Resumo

INTRODUCTION: Sustained attention is the ability to maintain an efficient level of response to task demands throughout time. It is a capacity which other types of attention depend on and it is considered fundamental to the success of many cognitive functions. The practice of sitting and silent meditation has been conceived as a type of sustained attention training, once it involves prolonged attention focalization on an object, for instance, breathing. OBJECTIVE: To compare the performance of meditators and nonmeditators on a sustained attention task, the Continuous Performance Test (CPT). METHOD: Ten practitioners of sitting and silent meditation, with a minimum of one year of practice, and eleven people with no prior experience in meditation paired by sex, age, and education took part in this study. We used the CPT with cue, where ten distracter letters (B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L), a target (A), and a cue (Z) were randomly presented. Participants had to press the space bar only when the letter “A” appeared after the cue. The task included 400 stimuli, of which 240 (60%) were distracters, 80 (20%) were cues, 40 (10%) were targets following the cue, and 40 (10%) were targets following distracters. The stimuli appeared in capital letters, were black with a white background, were in Times New Roman font size 80, were displayed for 500ms, and were presented on a 15-inch notebook monitor. The stimuli were divided into four blocks with different interstimulus interval (ISI), presented in the following order: 1500ms, 1000ms, 2000ms, and 1750ms. Only the reaction times of correct responses, which were log transformed, were analysed through a 4 x 2 ANOVA for repeated measures, which considered the order of blocks as a within factor and the group (meditation and control) as a between factor. The Mann Whitney U Test was used to compare the differences of commission, omission, and anticipatory errors between groups. RESULTS: Based on the exploratory analyses of reaction times, three outliers, two meditators and one control, were excluded. The meditators (N=8) had between 14 and 108 months of practice (M=35 months; DP=31,4), a mean age of 38 years (DP=12,3), 87,5% had higher education, and 6 were male. The control group (N=10) had a mean age of 39 years (DP=11,3), 90 % had higher education and 6 were male. There was a significant interaction between the order of the blocks and group [F(1,74)=4,25; p=0,029]. More specifically, the meditators were slower in the first block, but improved in the second one, maintaining stable performance, with the same mean, throughout the task. The control group, on the other hand, started faster, getting slower in the second and third blocks when compared to both their first block and the meditators. They improved again in the fourth block, although still slower than meditators. There were no significant differences in commission (p=0,15), omission (p=0,55), and anticipatory (p=0,31) errors between groups. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that meditators were able to maintain their attention level in a more efficient and stable way throughout the task and that, therefore, they seem to present a greater capacity of sustained attention. Longitudinal studies are necessary in order to demonstrate if this relationship is causal and if meditation could be a useful tool for attention training. Instituição de fomento: CNPq