Meditation and auditory attention: An ERP study of meditators and non-meditators Britta Biedermann a,b, ⁎, Peter de Lissa a , Yatin Mahajan c , Vince Polito a , Nicolas Badcock a , Michael H. Connors a , Lena Quinto a , Linda Larsen a , Genevieve McArthur a a Department of Cognitive Science and ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia b Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Perth, Australia c The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia abstract article info Article history: Received 26 June 2016 Received in revised form 2 September 2016 Accepted 26 September 2016 Available online 28 September 2016 The findings of a study by Cahn and Polich (2009) suggests that there is an effect of a meditative state on three event-related potential (ERP) brain markers of “low-level” auditory attention (i.e., acoustic representations in sensory memory) in expert meditators: the N1, the P2, and the P3a. The current study built on these findings by examining trait and state effects of meditation on the passive auditory mismatch negativity (MMN), N1, and P2 ERPs. We found that the MMN was significantly larger in meditators than non-meditators regardless of whether they were meditating or not (a trait effect), and that N1 amplitude was significantly attenuated during meditation in non-meditators but not expert meditators (an interaction between trait and state). These out- comes suggest that low-level attention is superior in long-term meditators in general. In contrast, low-level at- tention is reduced in non-meditators when they are asked to meditate for the first time, possibly due to auditory fatigue or cognitive overload. © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. Keywords: ERPs N1 MMN Auditory attention Meditation 1. Introduction Meditation has been described as the intentional regulation of atten- tion (Kabat-Zinn, 1982), and specific instructions for the intentional regulation of attention form the basis of many styles of meditative prac- tice (e.g., concentration on the breath; Tang & Posner, 2009; Tang et al., 2015). Given the central role that attention appears to play in medita- tion, it is interesting that a meta-analysis about the effects of meditation on behavioural variables concluded that meditation has only a moder- ate effect on measures of attention. However, this effect was measured across different meditation techniques (Sedlmeier et al., 2012), and the meta-analysis did not differentiate the effects of meditation on different “levels” of attention, such as early “low-level” processes of attention (e.g., the storage of stimulus features in the sensory memory) and “high-level” attention processes (e.g., complex attention skills, such as the ability to respond to multiple simultaneous streams of information). This raises the question of whether meditation has different effects on different types of attention that average together to produce a moderate effect on attention. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of meditation on one specific type of attention. We investigated low-level attention using event-related potentials (ERPs), which allows the measurement of attention during meditation without interrupting a meditator's practice. An ERP is an average electrical potential generated by groups of neu- rons in response to a particular event or stimulus (e.g., a musical tone, a written word, a spoken word, a face). ERPs can be measured under “pas- sive” conditions (i.e., an individual is not required to pay attention to a particular task or stimulus) or under active conditions (i.e., an individual is asked to attend to a stimulus or task). Passive and active ERPs are rep- resented by waveforms that comprise a series of positive and negative peaks. These peaks are named according to their position in that series (e.g., P1 is the first positive peak and N1 is the first negative peak; see Fig. 1(a–d) for an example) or according to their timing (e.g., the N100 is a negative peak that occurs approximately 100 ms in the wave- form, P200 is a positive peak that occurs at around 200 ms in the waveform). Several studies have compared meditators' and non-meditators' passive and active ERPs to various stimuli after a period of meditation (e.g., Banquet & Lesévre, 1980; Sarang & Telles, 2006; Travis & Miskov, 1994). This includes two studies that focused on “low-level” auditory at- tention (i.e., storage of acoustic features in the sensory memory; Cahn et al., 2013; Delgado-Pastor et al., 2014). However, to our knowledge, only two studies have used ERPs to measure low-level attention in med- itators during meditation (Cahn & Polich, 2009; Atchley et al., 2016). Cahn and Polich (2009) tested 16 Vipassana meditators during med- itation and non-meditation conditions for their passive auditory ERPs (N1, P2, P3a at midline frontal (Fz), central (Cz), and parietal (Pz) International Journal of Psychophysiology 109 (2016) 63–70 ⁎ Corresponding author at: School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Bentley, WA 6102, Australia. E-mail address: b.biedermann@curtin.edu.au (B. Biedermann). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2016.09.016 0167-8760/© 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Psychophysiology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijpsycho