Does mindfulness training help you let go of old mental sets?
After a six-week mindfulness course, people showed a cleaner sign of actively suppressing tasks they had just abandoned, while a waiting-list group did not, and a memory-tagging measure was unaffected.
Source
"Off with the old": mindfulness practice improves backward inhibition
Study at a glance
- Design
- RCT — Non-meditators randomly assigned to an 8-session mindfulness programme or a waiting list; backward inhibition and competitor rule suppression measured in a four-task switching paradigm before (vertical-boxes version) and near the end of the programme (faces version)
- N
- N=65 · 76 randomised (38 per group); analysed at post-test were 32 mindfulness and 33 waiting-list participants after drop-outs, low attendance and one injury
- Population
- Adults without prior meditation experience recruited through campus posters and student emails at Ben-Gurion University, Israel; native Hebrew speakers in their mid-twenties
- Outcome
- Backward inhibition (n-2 repetition cost: ABA vs CBA task sequences) and competitor rule suppression, in reaction time and error rate
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What they did
Seventy-six people with no meditation experience were tested on a task-switching paradigm, then randomly assigned to an eight-session mindfulness course based on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy or to a waiting list. Near the end of the course both groups did a second, differently designed four-task switching paradigm. The key measure was backward inhibition: slower or less accurate performance when returning to a task just abandoned (A-B-A) compared with an unrelated sequence (C-B-A). A second measure, competitor rule suppression, reflects tagging of competing rules in memory rather than active inhibition.
What they found
At baseline the groups did not differ; both showed backward inhibition in reaction time but the reverse in errors, indicating a speed-accuracy trade-off rather than a reliable inhibition effect. After the course, the waiting-list group kept this trade-off pattern, whereas the mindfulness group showed backward inhibition in reaction time with errors in the same direction, producing a significant group by backward-inhibition interaction in error rates. The group difference remained after controlling for baseline performance and mood. Competitor rule suppression was present in both groups at both sessions but did not differ between groups.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The main group difference appears only in error rates, as an interaction, and rests on interpreting a baseline speed-accuracy trade-off as 'no reliable inhibition', so the effect is modest and interpretation-dependent. The pre- and post-tests used different stimuli and tasks, so change within people could not be analysed directly. A waiting-list control cannot separate mindfulness from general effects such as group contact, expectation or an instructor, and the authors note an active control would be needed. Rumination was not measured, so the proposed link from backward inhibition to reduced rumination is speculation.
Key terms
- Backward inhibition (n-2 repetition cost)
- Poorer performance when returning to a task you just switched away from (A-B-A) than to one not recently used (C-B-A), taken as evidence the abandoned task was actively suppressed.
- Competitor rule suppression
- Poorer performance when the current task rule was a competing, response-conflicting rule on the previous trial, thought to reflect memory tagging of that rule as 'do not process'.
- Task switching
- A paradigm in which people alternate between several simple judgement rules signalled by cues, used to study cognitive control.
- Speed-accuracy trade-off
- Responding more slowly but more accurately (or faster but less accurately), which can make a reaction-time effect misleading on its own.
- Waiting-list control
- A comparison group that receives the intervention later, controlling for time and retesting but not for non-specific features of the intervention.
- Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
- A structured group programme combining meditation practices with cognitive therapy ideas, originally developed to prevent depressive relapse.
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Quiz yourself
Which task sequence is used to index backward inhibition?
Common questions
Why is backward inhibition a good measure for testing mindfulness?
Mindfulness is described as attending to the present rather than staying stuck in past mindsets. Backward inhibition specifically measures suppression of a task set that was recently relevant but no longer is, and it has no widely accepted non-inhibitory explanation.
Why include competitor rule suppression as well?
It comes from the same paradigm but reflects memory tagging rather than active inhibition. Finding change in one but not the other suggests mindfulness targets inhibition specifically, not task-switching performance in general.
Does this show mindfulness reduces rumination?
No. Rumination was not measured. The authors only suggest that, because poor backward inhibition has been linked to rumination elsewhere, improved inhibition could be one route by which mindfulness helps.
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