Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility

05 February 2009

The dissertation project carried out by former LJMU student Adam Moore, who graduated on our BSc (hons) Programme in Applied Psychology in 2007, has just been published in the prestigious scientific journal Consciousness & Cognition under the title 'Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility'.

Supervised by Senior Lecturer Dr Peter Malinowski, Adam carried out a study in which he compared a group of Buddhist meditators with a meditation-naive control group on several tasks that measure cognitive flexibility and the speed of processing visual information. Furthermore, it was studied whether the performance on these tasks is related to the levels of mindfulness the participants self-reported.

As the ability to take control of usually automatic, inflexible responses is considered to be a key component of mindfulness, it was expected that meditators, and especially those with raised levels of mindfulness, would score higher on tests that require such control of automatic responses. This was exactly what the study confirmed. Meditators performed better on all measures of cognitive flexibility and speed of information processing and those who reported higher levels of mindfulness also tended to score higher on the same performance measures.

The study highlights the potential of meditation practice to increase levels of mindfulness and reduce the predominance of 'auto-pilot' responses, both factors that appear to be related to psychological health and well-being.

Adam and Peter wrote up the study to fit the requirements of Consciousness & Cognition, a journal that regularly features high-profile publications in the growing area of consciousness studies.

The full reference of the study is: Moore, A., & Malinowski, P. (2009). Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility. Consciousness and Cognition, in press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2008.12.008