Mindfulness
Does mindfulness training help you let go of old mental sets?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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