Breath-counting task (BCT)
A behavioural paradigm (Levinson et al. 2014) that turns focused-attention meditation into something scoreable. Instead of asking a meditator whether their mind wandered, the BCT has them count breaths in fixed cycles and press keys to mark each count, the end of each cycle, and any moment they notice they have lost count. A miscount or a reset is a mind-wandering event, caught by the participant and time-stamped — so the task supplies an objective index of on-task versus off-task attention using nothing but the breath.
Why the wiki has it
The BCT is the operational bridge between the wiki’s contemplative material (breath-focused mindfulness-meditation) and its attention/mind-wandering material. It is the paradigm behind Treves et al. (2025), the wiki’s first first-hand fMRI study of breath attention, and it recurs across the breathing-attention literature the wiki holds by citation (Harrison et al. 2021; Farb et al. 2023; Wong et al. 2018).
What the outcomes mean
Three behavioural outcomes fall out of the task and they are not redundant: correct cycles, miscounts (the count drifted without being noticed until cycle-end), and resets (the participant noticed the loss of count and acknowledged it). Wong et al. (2018) showed these relate differently to sustained attention and mind-wandering, so a BCT is not a single accuracy score but a small profile of how attention fails.
The physiological add-on
Pairing the task with a breath belt (as in Treves et al.) does two things: it lets RETROICOR regress out breathing-driven BOLD noise, and it lets the analyst define on-task periods (a cycle whose button presses and recorded breath peaks agree) against off-task periods (miscounts, resets) for within-task neural analysis. This is what makes the BCT usable for dynamic connectivity work that asks not just “task vs rest” but “attending vs not, moment to moment.”
The caution the wiki attaches
Treves et al. (2025) is the standing caveat: the BCT robustly separated focused attention from rest at the level of dynamic brain states, but the states that marked the task were not the states that marked within-task attention, and none predicted individual differences in attentiveness. The task is a good behavioural instrument; whether any single neural signature of “attending to the breath” underlies it across people is, on current evidence, unsettled. See treves-2025-breath-attention-dynamics.