A computational model of focused attention meditation and its transfer to a sustained attention task

Although meditation and mindfulness practices are widely discussed in the scientific literature, there is little formal theory about the cognitive mechanisms that comprise it. Here we begin to develop such a theory by creating a computational cognitive model of a particular type of meditation: focused attention meditation. This model was created within Prims, a cognitive architecture similar to and based on ACT-R, which enables us to make predictions about the cognitive tasks that meditation experience may affect. We implemented a model based on an extensive literature review of how the meditation experience unfolds over time. We then subjected the Prims model to a session of the Sustained Reaction to Response Task, a task typically used to study sustained attention, a faculty that may be trained with meditation practice. Analyses revealed that the model was significantly more sensitive to detecting targets and non-targets after the meditation practice than before. These results agree qualitatively with empirical findings of a longitudinal study conducted in 2010. These results suggest that our approach to modeling meditation and its effects of cognition is feasible.