An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Meditation On Attention And Mental Imagery

The study of meditation has been widely concerned by the researchers.But there are few research on Chinese Buddhism meditation.And these researches are almost about the impact of meditation on the fields of attention,emotion,cognition and so on.In the cognitive research of Buddhist meditation,researchers mostly studied the impact of meditation on conflict detection,working memory,creativity and convergent thinking.There are few empirical studies on the impact of meditation on mental imagery.Therefore,this thesis attempted to explore the influence of Chinese Buddhist meditation techniques on attention and mental imagery.There were three stages to train the participants with the Chinese Buddhist meditation techniques adopted in this thesis:1)Firstly,the trainer used the Chinese Buddhism Samatha meditation.It is a kind of meditatin techniques aimed at focusing attention,which was used to train the participants to focus on concentration;the Chinese Buddhism Samatha meditation is namely FA meditation(Focused Attention,FA).2)Secondly,the trainer used the meditation techniques of opening monitoring(OM,Opening Monitoring)style,which was aimed at exercising the sensory of the participants;the OM meditation is namely elementary Chinese BuddhismVipasyana meditation.3)Thirdly,trainer used the Vipasyana practice without object or judging of Chinese Buddism meditation,which was aimed at training a kind of consciousness in a high level.There were two groups.So the mixed design within and between groups was taken in this study.The research had three parts:1)Based on the previous research,the study summarized the uniqueness of Chinese Buddhism meditation,and prepared for the futural empirical research;2)The participants received the training for 4 days in study 1.The treatment group took the Samatha techniques,while the control group took the relaxation training.Studyl examined if the 2 different trainings had different influence on the participants' attention.3)Study 2 was based on study 1.In study 2,it investigated that if the two Chinese Buddhism Vipasyana meditations and the relaxation training had different influence on the participants in the mental imagery.The results are as followed:1)Comparing with the relaxation training,Chinese Buddhism Samatha meditation could significantly improve the attention of the participants;2)The elementary Chinese Buddhism Vipasyana meditation could improve the imagery abilities of the participants;3)There was no difference between the influences that the Vipasyana meditation without object or judging and the relaxation training had on the imagery abilities of participants.