Journal Article

Attention and meditative development: A review and synthesis of long-term meditators and outlook for the study of advanced meditation

Ehmann, Sebastian, Sezer, Idil, Treves, Isaac N., Sacchet, Matthew D., Keller, Arielle S.

2025

Overview

•LTMs exhibit improved executive, orienting, alerting, and sustained attention.•Meditative growth is non-linear, multidimensional, and requires balanced practice.•Attentional neurobiological changes seemed practice-specific and transferable.•Future studies may aim to better understand state, trait, and interaction effects.•Attention is a promising domain for empirically testing contemplative constructs. Attention regulation is a core mechanism of mindfulness meditation and has been proposed to underlie many of its health-related benefits. Here, we review and synthesize behavioral findings on attentional outcomes in long-term meditators, integrating neurocognitive evidence within a meditative development framework. Key findings indicate trait-level improvements across attentional functions—executive attention, sustained attention, hierarchical and general orienting—and attentional phenomena, such as the attentional blink. Preliminary evidence also identifies trait enhancements in response inhibition, alertness, and reduced mind-wandering. Interaction effects were found for response inhibition, sustained attention, reduced mind-wandering, and alertness, with alertness benefiting most strongly from long-term and intensive acute practice. As expected, attention-based outperformed non-attention-based techniques, while observe-and-release techniques facilitated attentional orienting and detection of closely spaced or unexpected stimuli during sustained attention tasks. These findings suggest that long-term meditation may enhance attention regulation in accordance with training specificity principles; the cognitive functions most directly targeted are the most likely to improve. Nevertheless, broader findings indicate that meditative development may depend on the balanced cultivation of multiple faculties over time, highlighting the non-linear and multidimensional nature of long-term meditative change. Consistent with traditional goals of cultivating mental faculties, the present findings may reflect attentional adaptations that support the development of advanced meditative states. Despite considerable consistency in empirical results, methodological limitations—including heterogeneous study designs and insufficient differentiation between states and traits—complicate interpretations. Future research should prioritize operationalizing and measuring contemplative constructs within integrative frameworks and using rigorous factorial designs to clarify state-trait interactions and meditation predictors.

• Publisher: Elsevier Inc,Elsevier Limited,Elsevier
• Subject: Advanced meditation / Attention / Attention - physiology / Attention regulation / Awareness / Cognition / Cognitive ability / Executive Function - physiology / Humans / Long-term meditators / Meditation / Meditation - psychology / Meditative development / Mindfulness / Radiology/Diagnostic Imaging