Mindfulness reduces habitual responding based on implicit knowledge: Evidence from artificial grammar learning

• Published in: Consciousness and cognition Vol. 22; no. 3; pp. 833 - 845
• Main Authors: Whitmarsh, Stephen, Uddén, Julia, Barendregt, Henk, Petersson, Karl Magnus
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01.09.2013; Elsevier; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Artificial grammar; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Consciousness; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Implicit learning; Knowledge; Learning; Learning - physiology; Learning. Memory; Male; Meditation; Mindfulness; Personality; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Unconscious (Psychology); Young Adult; Implicit learning; Meditation; Mindfulness; Artificial grammar; Human; Acquisition process; Consciousness; Cognition; Experimental study; Knowledge
• ISSN: 1053-8100; 1090-2376; 1090-2376
• DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2013.05.007

•Subjects acquired implicit knowledge in an artificial grammar learning experiment.•Mindfulness impaired performance on subsequent preference and classification tasks.•Masked affective primes resulted in faster and more negative preference judgments. Participants were unknowingly exposed to complex regularities in a working memory task. The existence of implicit knowledge was subsequently inferred from a preference for stimuli with similar grammatical regularities. Several affective traits have been shown to influence AGL performance positively, many of which are related to a tendency for automatic responding. We therefore tested whether the mindfulness trait predicted a reduction of grammatically congruent preferences, and used emotional primes to explore the influence of affect. Mindfulness was shown to correlate negatively with grammatically congruent responses. Negative primes were shown to result in faster and more negative evaluations. We conclude that grammatically congruent preference ratings rely on habitual responses, and that our findings provide empirical evidence for the non-reactive disposition of the mindfulness trait.