Examining the Impact of Brief Mindfulness Practice on Sustained Attention, Attentional Inhibition and Convergent Thinking

Hughes, ZD ORCID: 0000-0001-5383-4584, Ball, LJ ORCID: 0000-0002-5099-0124, Atanasov, P and Judge, J (2025) Examining the Impact of Brief Mindfulness Practice on Sustained Attention, Attentional Inhibition and Convergent Thinking. Journal of Intelligence, 13 (9). p. 119. ISSN 2079-3200

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Abstract

There remains little understanding of how short-term mindfulness interventions influence creative cognition. We report an experiment that examined the impact of a brief mindfulness intervention on sustained attention, attentional inhibition, and convergent thinking, relative to a control group. Participants (N = 117) were assigned to either a brief mindfulness practice (n = 60) or an active control task (n = 57), before completing the following: (i) a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART), to assess sustained attention; (ii) a flanker task, to assess attentional inhibition; and (iii) a convergent thinking task (a series of rebus puzzles). The mindfulness group showed faster reaction times than the control group on the SART, along with fewer task-unrelated mind-wandering thoughts, suggestive of better sustained attention. The mindfulness group also demonstrated improved reaction times and accuracy relative to the control group during the flanker task, indicating enhanced inhibitory control. However, rebus puzzle scores did not differ between groups, indicating that although a brief mindfulness practice enhances sustained attention and attentional inhibition, this improved attentional control does not facilitate convergent thinking in solving rebus puzzles.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	attentional inhibition; creative cognition; mindfulness; rebus puzzles; sustained attention; 5202 Biological Psychology; 52 Psychology; Mind and Body; Complementary and Integrative Health; Behavioral and Social Science; 6.6 Psychological and behavioural; Mental health; 1701 Psychology; 5201 Applied and developmental psychology; 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology; 5205 Social and personality psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Psychology (from Sep 2019)
Publisher:	MDPI
Date of acceptance:	8 September 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	3 October 2025
Date Deposited:	03 Oct 2025 12:45
Last Modified:	03 Oct 2025 13:00
DOI or ID number:	10.3390/jintelligence13090119
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27264

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