Developing Attention and Decreasing Affective Bias
Jake H. Davis and Evan Thompson (2014)

Mindfulness
In Buddhism: Sati
'minding' in colloquial English (e.g. 'mind the gap')


Kabat-Zinn used the term mindfulness “as a place- holder for the entire dharma,”
a secular, umbrella term for the many varied techniques employed in diverse Buddhist traditions.

Consciousness

Attention

Creature consciousness


does not mean being awake because inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes of sentience and awareness (consciousness) occur during other states besides wakefulness, such as dreaming. (e.g. vegatative state patients undergo sleep/wake cycles)

State consciousness


the content and qualitative character of the particular mental states of the subject: that is, a person being conscious of a given stimulus versus not being conscious of the stimulus

Phenomenal Consciousness


a person is conscious of the stimulus if the person subjectively experiences the stimulus as being a certain way, that is, as having a certain qualitative appearance.


In this sense of conscious, a given mental state or bodily state is conscious if, and only if, there is something it is like for the subject to be in that state.


The concept of phenomenal consciousness allows for Blind Sight experiments, etc.

Access consciousness (or cognitive awareness)
(access here means available for use in thought and action)


the person can report or describe it, or reason about it, or use it to guide how he or she acts or behaves.


“thinking and memory come in a bit later, but very quickly, on the heels of an initial moment of pure sense contact” - Kabat-Zinn


Parvizi and Damasio’s (2001)
a basal or core level of consciousness, dependent on the thalamus and brainstem, that occurs independently of selective attentional processes in higher cortical areas.


This core or ground-floor level of consciousness depends on a basic kind of alerting function distinct from the higher-level mechanisms of selective attention that come into play in determining what one is conscious of.

Endogenous orienting (top-down attention)


The ability to switch your attention from the words on this page to the sensations in your right hand on request


Top-down attention depends on generating and maintaining a “control set” that specifies in advance what you are to select; thus, when you switched your attention to the sensations in your right hand, you did so by forming an attentional control set on the basis of our instructions.


The maintenance of an attentional control set depends crucially on working memory, the ability to retain task- relevant information on a short-term basis

Exogenous orienting (stimulus-driven, bottom-up attention)


activated when a strong or salient stimulus, such as a loud siren or a flash of light, grabs your attention

Working memory


when meditators apply instructions to attend to the sensations of the breath in mindfulness practice, working memory plays a role in specifying how attention is to be directed

selective, top-down spatial attention, increases ability to detect and report on weak stimuli by directly amplifying early sensory responses to stimuli in an area of the body and inhibiting responses to other areas.

directing subjects with a visual word cue to attend either to the hand or to the foot exerts effects on the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) even in the absence of tactile stimulation to these areas.
Moreover, the degree of attentional modulation of S1 was predictive of detection of tactile stimuli, when they were applied.

effects of bodily attention were enhanced in groups undergoing MBSR training compared to a control group, and increased performance on tasks measuring top-down orienting, as well as enhanced activity in brain areas specific to interoceptive attention

Biased Competition
Desimone and Duncan’s (1995)


representations in early sensory areas compete with one another for access to downstream resources, such as those involved in the ability to have conscious access to the sensory response and to report on it


Top-down modulation by attentional control sets serves to bias these competitions in favor of certain sensory responses

Attention as an emergent property
(Rolls, 2008)


feedback and feedforward effects between working memory areas and sensory processing areas settle into an optimal configuration for energy minimization

Attentional Blink


subjects have to identify two visual targets presented within 200 to 500 milliseconds of each other in a rapid sequence of other distracting visual stimuli. Subjects often notice the first target but fail to notice the second one, as if their attention had blinked. The standard explanation is that detecting the first target uses up the available attentional resources, so the second target is missed and not reported.

mindfulness meditation may lead to less elaborative cognitive processing of the first visual target— less “mental stickiness” to it—and that this reduction facilitates the ability to identify and report the second rapidly occurring target

By reducing top-down orienting, and instead cultivating a general and receptive awareness, individals can become conscious of more subtle and fleeting stimuli than they would be able to otherwise.
In other words, mindfulness practice may involve enhancing the processes involved in sustaining the basal alert consciousness instead of acting simply on selective attention (as more concentrative type meditation practices are likely to do).

The attention network
Posner et al.


three intereacting attentional networks:

  • alerting
    • bottom-up
  • orienting
    • the hub of top-down and bottom-up convergence
  • executive control
    • top-down influence on selective attention

Alerting subdivided:

  • phasic alertness
    • task- specific sensitivity to a particular class of stimuli
    • e.g. a radar operator watches vigilantly for indications of incoming aircraft
  • intrinsic or tonic alertness
    • the general level of arousal and sensitivity to stimuli across a range of sense modalities that is characteristic of being minimally conscious

developing focused attention, for instance, on the breath or mental states, may help to cultivate a more general alertness to a range of stimuli across perceptual modalities, thereby increasing the scope of the basal phenomenal consciousness

Davis & Thompson (2013)


  • increased alertness
    • increased consciousness of internal and external stimuli that would otherwise not be consciously experienced
  • attenuation of affective biases of attention and memory

Consistent with:

  • increased alertness in mindfulness interventions
  • a basic, core level of consciousness, dependent on the thalamus and brainstem, that occurs independently of selective attentional processes in higher cortical areas (Damsio & Parvizi 2001)

Buddhism

the stages of affective appraisal and cognitive appraisal serve as the basis of thought and conceptual proliferation


According to this Buddhist model, initial distortions of attention and memory affect later conceptualizations of the experience


in the recent psychological literature, biases of attention and memory have been suggested as affecting the trajectory of psychological reactions to emotionally salient stimuli

mindfulness, besides leading to increased awareness of one’s own emotional reactions, may lead to more accurate awareness, in particular by attenuating affective biases that underlie distortions of attention and memory


Note Cognitive & affective reactivity as strongest mediator in Cavanagh's meta-analysis

  1. Cognitive and emotional reactivity

"The extent to which a mild state of distress coupled with stress reactivates negative thinking and emotional patterns, putting individuals at risk of a depressive episode"


NOTE: only MBCT studies investigated this
strong and consistent evidence


(From Cavanagh/Gu 2015)
MBCT - Williams clinical program

Possible explanation:
affective biases increase the tendency of attention to return again and again to mental images that spark negative affect, and that mindfulness decreases proliferation by attenuating affective biases of attention and memory.

the extension of one’s conscious experience to include a broader range of current stimuli may counteract affective biases by reducing fixation on one stimulus or one recurrent memory

by attenuating affective biases, mindfulness practitioners may become conscious of a broader range of stimuli and also reduce emotional proliferation following pleasant or unpleasant experience


Without reduction in emotional fixation (due to affective biases of attention and memory) generalized increases in alertness can lead to pathological symptoms (e.g. panic attack when one fixates on an unpleasant stimulus).

latent craving and aversion are said to result in perceptual distortions, which when elaborated lead to distortions of both thought and view when such thought patterns become habitual


evaluative conceptual understandings informed by mindfulness practice may often be crucial in making decisions that are skillful, in the sense of not setting one up for suffering


mindfulness transforms evaluative and ethical judgments but does not eradicate them