Short-term Integrative Body Mind Training Improves Executive Control Function And Its Brain Mechanisms

Executive control function is one of the big issues in cognitive research nowadays. It refers that, in order to implement a specific target, cognitive system coordinates and optimizes various cognitive processes in a flexible manner to complete complex cognitive tasks with a control mechanism. Through the control and regulation of other cognitive processes, it can make people’s behavior coordinated, orderly and purposeful. If there is a dysfunction in executive control, patients will have disorders in cognition, emotion and social function. Thus it would have theoretical and practical significances to research on executive control function.Integrative Body Mind Training is one kind of meditation training. It has been considered that IBMT has good effect in people’s emotional state and cognitive ability.Till now, Stroop task has been considered a classic psychology behavior paradigm to test executive control ability. Frontal lobe and parietal lobe of the executive control network are two most important brain regions in executive control function.Therefore, in this paper we will use the numerical Stroop test and resting state functional connectivity method for the research on the effects of IBMT on the change of participants’ behavior and brain mechanisms. Here are our results:1. We both measured IBMT and RT participant’s reaction time of three conditions before training, after10-days and20-days trainings. We found after10-days training, participant’s reaction time in the IBMT group marginally significantly reduced in all the three conditions, congruent condition, incongruent condition and neutral condition. But the participants’ reaction time in RT group didn’t significantly change. And after20-days training, participant’s reaction time in the IBMT group significantly reduced in all the three conditions while the RT participants’reaction time of incongruent condition significantly change.2. Through blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of resting state, we found after10days training, functional connectivity of two pairs regions of executive control network (left superior parietal and right superior parietal, dorsal medial PFC and right superior parietal) has grown up in the IBMT group but not RT group. It means short term IBMT has functional plastic effects on executive control network in resting state.