Yes. A preregistered eye-tracking study found that 30 days of guided mindfulness meditation produced measurable gains in attention control. Participants across young, middle-aged, and older groups showed faster saccadic reaction times and improved goal-directed selection of targets, with modest reductions in distractibility in one task. Some improvements overlapped with an audiobook control, but faster saccadic reactions were specific to mindfulness practice.
What did the study test?
Researchers ran a preregistered, longitudinal experiment comparing 30 days of app-guided mindfulness practice with an active control (daily audiobook listening). During three lab visits, 69 adults spanning young, middle-aged, and older groups completed two visual search tasks while their eye movements were recorded. The tasks probed core attention mechanisms: selecting the goal-relevant target, resisting capture by a colorful distractor, and the speed of initiating eye movements.
The full paper is open access in eNeuro: The Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Mechanisms of Attentional Control in Young and Older Adults.
What did the study find?
Short-term, app-based mindfulness training improved attention control on objective eye-tracking measures, with benefits observed across age groups and without reliance on self-report scores.
- Faster saccadic reaction times after mindfulness, a change not seen with the audiobook control in primary analyses, indicating a mindfulness-specific boost in the speed of initiating attention shifts.
- Better goal-directed selection of the target in several conditions after mindfulness. Some of these gains also appeared after the audiobook month, suggesting practice effects contribute.
- Lower distractibility by a salient color distractor in one of the tasks following mindfulness; effects were modest.
- No age interaction: young, middle-aged, and older adults improved similarly.
- Self-report mindfulness scores (MAAS, FFMQ) did not reliably increase, implying objective eye-tracking is more sensitive than questionnaires for short interventions.
These results align with prior evidence that meditation can enhance attention and executive control, though average effect sizes in the broader literature are usually small to moderate (JAMA meta-analysis), (Sumantry & Stewart, 2021).
How does mindfulness meditation influence attention mechanisms?
Mindfulness practice trains sustained, nonjudgmental focus on present-moment experience, which can strengthen the brain networks that prioritize relevant information and suppress irrelevant signals. Neuroimaging work links mindfulness to activity in prefrontal and cingulate control regions that guide attention switching and stability (Tang, Hölzel & Posner, 2015). The eNeuro study’s fastest-changing metric was the saccadic reaction time, a sensitive indicator of how quickly the brain initiates an orienting response.
Saccadic reaction time is the latency to launch the first eye movement after a stimulus appears. Shorter latencies indicate faster initiation of attention shifts and are widely used as an objective index of cognitive processing speed.
The authors discuss the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system, which modulates arousal and attention, as a plausible pathway, though the study did not directly measure it. Prior work shows meditation can influence arousal-linked circuitry and attention networks (Dickenson et al., 2013), but causal mechanisms here remain to be tested.
Who benefits from mindfulness in this study?
Benefits were similar across ages. Despite well-known age-related differences in attention control and distractibility, the intervention’s effects did not differ between young, middle-aged, and older adults. This suggests short, app-guided practice can enhance certain attention processes regardless of age.
How strong are the effects and what are the limitations?
- Effect size and scope: Improvements were statistically reliable but modest and specific to certain measures, especially saccadic initiation speed.
- Practice effects: Some gains in goal-directed selection also appeared after the audiobook period, indicating that repeated testing or structured daily activity can improve performance. The saccadic reaction time benefit was more specific to mindfulness.
- Self-report mismatch: Questionnaire scores did not shift, which is common in brief, app-based interventions and suggests objective tasks may be more sensitive over 30 days.
- Ecological validity: Eye-tracking tasks are controlled lab measures. Real-world attention benefits were not directly tested.
- Mode of delivery: This was app-based training. Some reviews find smaller effects with smartphone programs than with in-person courses (Wu et al., 2022).
What does this mean if you want to improve attention?
A 10 to 15 minute guided mindfulness session daily for about 30 days, as used in the study, is a practical starting point. Expect subtle, measurable gains in specific attention skills rather than dramatic changes, and consider that consistent practice and task familiarity both contribute to improvement. For stronger or broader effects, longer training or instructor-led programs may help, based on broader research.
For background on brief interventions and outcomes, see systematic reviews of short mindfulness programs (Howarth et al., 2019) and comprehensive neuroscience overviews (Tang, Hölzel & Posner, 2015).