The Effects Of Meditation And Progressive Relaxation On Performance Tasks Requiring Focused Attention

In order to investigate the effects of meditation on performance tasks requiring focused attention, forty-one subjects who had never meditated were randomly divided into four groups: (i) a group that was trained in a Zazen meditative technique (N = 11); (2) a group that was trained in progressive relaxation (N = 10); (3) a group that only met with the experimenter and talked (N = 10); and (4) a no treatment control group (N = 10). Six dependent measures were used in a pretest-posttest design: (1) Anagrams; (2) the Wechsler Memory Scale; (3) the Digit Span Subtest from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale; (4) the Benton Visual Retention Test; (5) a Facial Recognition Test; and (6) the Minnosota Paper Form Board Test. The study was implemented for six weeks with records kept by each subject in the meditation and relaxation group of time spent each day in practicing their designated technique which was an average of 30 minutes per day. On the posttests, no significant differences were found between any of the four groups on any of the six dependent measures.