One of the overarching themes of the lab is the distinction between having an experience, known as experiential consciousness, and knowing that you are having an experience, or having meta-awareness.
Probably the most salient topic of research in the lab is mind-wandering, the manner in which the mind drifts away from the here and now, which can be roughly divided into five categories.
An exciting recent advance in the lab’s research agenda has been an examination of the impact of meditation and mindfulness techniques on attenuating mind-wandering.
The lab has examined creativity from a number of different perspectives. Most recently we have examined the relationship between creativity and mind wandering.
The decline effect occurs when results which are rigorously obtained do not hold up in repeated trials. This lab is interested in investigating the cause of this frustrating phenomena which appears in a wide range of domains in science.
Although we experience emotions all day long, we only periodically stop and take stock of what emotion we are experiencing. This leads to interesting temporal dissociation between the experience of emotions and our meta-awareness of them.
A long time interest has been the validity of recovered memories of sexual abuse. Although this has been a highly polarized topic with some researchers asserting that recovered memories are largely accurate and others insisting that they are generally false, our research suggest that both possibilities occur with some regularity.
With the support of a generous gift from the James Bower foundation the lab has continued to conduct controversial research on anomalous cognition or what is better known as parapsychology.
