Individual Differences in Meta-aware mind-wandering

We engage with mind-wandering every day. During a task, we may become bored and start thinking about something else, i.e. shopping on the way home. Mind wandering's prevalence within everyday life is undeniable and often occurs without the individual being aware of it. Mind-wandering with awareness (also referred to as meta-awareness) is considered to reflect an individual’s ability to executively monitor cognition, which is now understood as an important component of mind-wandering. Importantly, it is thought that a lack of meta-awareness may give rise to, and enable, the generation and prolonged engagement with mind-wandering. There is evidence that when mind-wandering occurs with meta-awareness, there are differences in primary task performance (Smallwood et al., 2007), and in the neural processes involved (Lui et al., 2021) compared to when mind-wandering occurs without meta-awareness. However, despite the increasing evidence that meta-awareness may play an important role in the engagement of mind-wandering, it is often neglected in theoretical accounts of mind-wandering, which place a greater emphasis on the role of attentional control. Currently, within the literature, only the perceptual decoupling theory is able to integrate meta-awareness as a consideration for the generation of mind-wandering (Schooler et al., 2011). The role of attentional control and its relationship to mind-wandering is undeniable; however, its relationship to meta-awareness is still unknown. This leads us to our main question: to what degree is meta-awareness responsible for the generation of mind-wandering when accounting for fluctuations in attentional control. We aim to understand the relationship between meta-awareness and cognitive control to quantify the idea that the generation of mind-wandering may not be due to failures in attentional control alone but in combination with a diminished meta-awareness, which is the ability to executively monitor cognition during tasks.