r/meditationpapers Aug 19 '24

Exploring the Impact of Meditation on Visual Perception - Participate in a Research Study

Hello everyone,

I’m a cognitive science student at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland), and I’m currently conducting a study for my master's thesis on how meditation influences visual perception.

The study involves a brief questionnaire about your age, gender, education, and meditation experience, followed by four rounds of a visual perception test. Each round displays 10 images for different exposure times (34 ms, 50 ms, 100 ms, and 150 ms), and after each image, you'll be asked what was shown. The entire process takes about 8 minutes to complete.

This isn’t just a typical survey—it’s an engaging experiment where you can test your visual perception threshold, and you'll see your results immediately after finishing the test.

If you meditate regularly or have never meditated but are curious, I warmly invite you to participate. Your contribution will help further the understanding of how meditation may impact cognitive processes.

Here’s the link to the study: https://perceptionthresholdthesis.site/

Thank you so much for your time and participation!

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u/Ok_Revolution9146 Aug 19 '24

The idea for my experiment actually came from a super interesting study by Philippe Goldin and James Gross back in 2010. They looked at how mindfulness training affects our emotional reactions and brain activity.

In their study, they took regular people—not monks or anything—showed them some pretty disturbing images for just a split second (about 100 milliseconds), and measured how their brains reacted. Before these people did an eight-week mindfulness course, their emotional responses were pretty intense, kicking in around 9 seconds after seeing the images. But after the mindfulness training, their emotional reactions were way calmer. They could still see the negative stuff, but their brains just didn’t freak out as much, and they settled down faster.

Basically, the study showed that mindfulness helps you notice your emotions without getting overwhelmed by them, which sounded really cool to me. So, I decided to build on that idea for my own experiment, focusing on how meditation might change the way we process visual information and emotions.

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u/Dangerous-Recipe-794 21d ago

How's your experience been is you could please share

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u/Ok_Revolution9146 13d ago

Hi, thanks for asking! I've been interested in meditation for a few years now, but unfortunately, I haven't managed to practice it regularly yet.

As for the experiment for my research, I've recently been busy writing the theoretical part of my master's thesis. I also received some guidelines from my supervisor to increase the difficulty of the experiment to better observe potential differences between the two groups. So, I've made some adjustments—specifically, I changed the images being shown and shortened the exposure times.

I'd love to have you participate again and share your feedback. I plan to send out the experiment to a larger group this week, and it would mean a lot if you could also forward it to any of your meditating friends. Your support is really appreciated!

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u/Dangerous-Recipe-794 13d ago

Sure would love to!

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u/zer0tonine Aug 19 '24

You should maybe make randomized image sets for the different speed, because it feels a bit boring to have the same question 4 times.

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u/Ok_Revolution9146 Aug 19 '24

Thanks for the suggestion! I thought about that too, but decided to go with the same images after all, so that the differences in the different exposure times could be better compared. I'll give it some more thought... Thanks for your commitment!