A primer on meta-awareness of mind wandering in schizotypy and schizophrenia

During everyday life, our attention may drift away from immediate perceptual inputs to consider alternatives unrelated to the task at hand, which is known as mind wandering. At times, mind wandering may be accompanied by awareness of one’s attention having deviated from the ongoing task, often referred to as meta-awareness. However, mind wandering can also occur without individuals immediately noticing that their attention is off task. Importantly, little is known about mind wandering and meta-awareness, including their underlying content in schizotypy and schizophrenia. Here, in this narrative review, we synthesise the existing literature on mind wandering across the schizotypy-schizophrenia continuum. In doing so, we present the main proposal that there would be lower levels of meta-awareness of mind wandering in patients with schizophrenia as compared to healthy controls. We expect that meta-awareness of mind wandering would be negatively associated with schizophrenia symptomatology and multidimensional schizotypy traits. We also recommend examining mind wandering content in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, including links between multidimensional schizotypy and the contents of meta-awareness of mind wandering. Ultimately, we hope that our proposal will be empirically tested in future research and will provide a foundation to understand the diversity of mind wandering features in clinical populations as well as insights into potential new treatment avenues.