Reduced processing of afforded actions while observing mental content as ongoing mental phenomena

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology of Consciousness
• Meditation Research

Background:

• Consciousness is often equated with mental content.
• Open monitoring (OM) meditation may induce a de-reified state, reducing intentionality (mental acts on content).
• This state might alter how we process objects that imply actions (affordances).

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if OM meditation reduces mental actional processing of affording objects.
• To compare long-term meditators with novices in processing high- vs. low-affordance objects during baseline and OM states.
• To explore the neural correlates of affordance processing and perceptual awareness during meditation.

Main Methods:

• Recruited long-term meditators and novice meditators.
• Participants performed an object-affordance task (high- vs. low-affordance) during baseline and OM states.
• Electroencephalography (EEG) recorded neural activity, focusing on µ-rhythm desynchronization.

Main Results:

• Long-term meditators, unlike novices, showed abolished preferential processing of high-affordance images during OM.
• Novices consistently preferred high-affordance over low-affordance images in both states.
• Increased µ-rhythm desynchronization correlated with longer perceptual durations, linking neural processing to awareness.

Conclusions:

• Open monitoring meditation may help decouple automatic cognitive processing of affording objects.
• This suggests OM meditation can alter the automaticity of action-related cognitive processes.
• The findings provide neural evidence for how meditation impacts object perception and cognitive control.