The META Lab's focus can be understood through the concept of meta-awareness. Meta-awareness is a conscious and deliberative interpretation of one's mental state. Mind wandering while reading is a good example of how meta-awareness operates in our day-to-day lives. Most people have had the experience of, despite their best efforts, failing to keep one's attention focused on what they are reading. Thoughts may drift to what's for dinner that night, when the basketball game is coming on, or any manner of task unrelated thoughts. While people are certainly experientially conscious of these intrusive thoughts, it is unlikely that they are meta-aware of these thoughts - they have not yet realized that they are mind wandering. This is evident in that if they had realized they were off task, they would have stopped immediately and continued the task of reading.

Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler are currently researching meta-awareness in the context of mind wandering in the interest of uncovering the nature of task unrelated thoughts and the psychological processes that operate both while mind wandering, as well as the processes that initiate and terminate mind wandering. See the publications page for chapters and articles associated with this research.

A meta-awareness of an experience may not perfectly capture all of the important elements of that experience. As a result, generating a new meta-awareness of an experience may interfere with operations that require an accurate and nuanced conceptualization of the original experience. We term such events, translation dissociations of meta-awareness. The phenomenon known as verbal overshadowing is a translation dissociation. Originally studied in the context of memory for faces, verbal overshadowing can occur when one is asked to verbally describe a previously seen face. This act of verbal description often leads to a decrease in recognition memory for this face. Because faces are complex and holistically processed stimuli, verbal description can lead to a meta-awareness that differs from the original stimuli. Jonathan Schooler has studied verbal overshadowing for several years and across many domains, such as memory for wines and judgment and decision making.