ORIGINAL PAPER Prior meditation practice modulates performance and strategy use in convergent- and divergent -thinking problems

Scientific interest in meditation has significantly grown in the past years; however, so far, science has neglected the idea that different type of meditations may drive specific cognitivecontrol states. It has been showed that focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM) meditation exert specific effect on creativity, OM meditation induces a control state that promotes divergent thinking, a style of thinking that allows many new ideas to be generated; while FA meditation does not sustain convergent thinking, the process of generating one possible solution to a particular problem. In the present study, by using creativity tasks tapping into convergent (Compound Remote Associates; cRAT) and divergent thinking (Alternate Uses Task; AUT), we investigated whether this effect was modulated by prior meditation experience, by comparing a group of practitioners (n=20) and a group of novices (n=20). The enhancing effect of OM meditation on divergent thinking was found to be robust irrespective of prior experience. In contrast, while solving convergent thinking problems, practitioners used an insight strategy, as opposed to an analytical approach, significantly more often than the novices.