CONTEXT: Although cognitive aspects of meditation underlie much of its clinical application, very little research has examined meditation’s cognitive consequences. This investigation provides experimental support for the idea that meditation leads to a reduction in habitual responding using randomly selected subjects, a secular form of meditation, and a full experimental design.

OBJECTIVE: To test the hypothesis that meditation leads to a reduction in habitual responding. DESIGN: Studies 1 and 2 each incorporated pre-test and post-test designs with a 20-minute intervening attention task (meditation, rest, or a cognitive control).

SETTING: Yale University in New Haven, Conn, and the University of California, Berkeley. PARTICIPANTS: One hundred and twenty and 90 undergraduates participated in Studies 1 and 2, respectively.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Stroop and Word Production (category generation and stem-completion) tasks assessed habitual responding in Study 1. Galvanic Skin response measured arousal in Study 1. The category generation task assessed habitual responding in Study 2. Tellegen’s Absorption Scale (TAS) measured attention ability.

RESULTS: In Study 1, meditation participants showed a reduction in habitual responding on the Stroop task as compared to controls. Study 1 revealed no statistically significant effects in the word production task. Stroop task performance was not mediated by arousal reduction. In Study 2, meditation participants showed a reduction in habitual responding on the category production task. Specifically, when participants generated either typical or atypical items, on average, meditation participants produced more atypical items than controls. Category production performance was not mediated by Tellegen’s Absorption Scale (TAS) scores. Overall, high TAS scores were related to atypical responding.

CONCLUSION: Across cognitive tasks, when participants understood that the goal was to respond non-habitually, meditation reduced habitual responding.