The term comes from the meta prefix's modern meaning of an abstract recursion, or "X about X", similar to its use in metaknowledge, metamemory, and meta-emotion.
[1] A 2013 paper provided a strong critique[2] of this attempt, arguing that it was based on misapplication of complex mathematical modelling.
It comprises one control parameter and three state variables, which in this case have been mapped to "connectivity", "inquiry-advocacy", "positivity-negativity", and "other-self" (external-internal focus) respectively.
One proposed result of this theory is that there is a ratio of positivity-to-negativity of at least 2.9 (called the Losada line), which separates high from low performance teams as well as flourishing from languishing in individuals and relationships.
The goal is to find a set of parameters that work well across different tasks so that learners start with a bias that allows them to perform well despite receiving only a small amount of task-specific data.