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People's complaints of poor attention and focus have increased with the distracting complexity of modern life. In a 6-week, randomized, controlled study involving 44 meditation-naive, healthy young adults (age range, 18–35), researchers tested the benefit of their self-paced, mobile phone app with adaptive algorithms for teaching a common breath-focused meditative procedure (MediTrain); the app provided personalized feedback and iterative adjustments of degree of difficulty. The control app was judged by an independent sample of young adults as likely to improve cognition.
Within 2 weeks after training, the meditation app was associated with improved performance on a vigilance task requiring rapid response to rare targets (faster response wi…