With repeated practice meditators report a capacity to focus and sustain their attention whilst experiencing a decreased frequency of distractions or intrusions into their attentional field during both formal meditation and everyday life situations [ 24].
"The Global Partnership to Battle Donor Attention Deficit Disorder (to be known as GloPBADD) will develop preventive and therapeutic drugs and devices to increase the ability of those in the global health community to sustain their attention for up to two decades".
Attention test performances revealed that drug naive patients presented a decrease in their ability to respond promptly to a stimulus, sustain their attention on a task, display normal selective attention strategies, and maintain information for on-line processing.
The LDT counting task was designed to ensure that participants sustained their attention to the stimuli.
Moreover, a negative-going slow wave was observed after the P3 and before the second item was displayed, when participants had to sustain their attention (hold condition; see Figure 4).
Reaction times were shorter in the hold condition probably because participants knew they had to respond to all items in this condition: As long as they had to sustain their attention and process the second item of a pair, participants made a classical lexical decision.
In each trial, two different situations could arise: (1) when the first item of a pair was congruent with the target category, participants had to sustain their attention and hold the lexical category of the first item of the pair in working memory until they could reach a decision about its congruency (hold condition).
When participants had to sustain their attention and process the second item of a pair in order to make a decision, the P3 was followed by a negative wave with a centroparietal distribution, which resolved at the onset of the second item.
When participants had to wait for the presentation of the second item of the pair, they had to sustain their attention between the presentation of item 1 and 2. In this condition (Hold), ERP waves displayed a typical pattern of slowly increasing negativity presumably reflecting the build-up of attentional resources necessary for adequate processing of the following item [49].
On the other hand, when the first stimulus in a pair was congruent with the target category (e.g., a word), participants needed to sustain their attention in order to successfully process the second stimulus before making a decision (hold condition).
