(NOTE: This page is aimed at academics. On my early years page I also have links to three recent practitioner-facing podcasts about this, and I’ve put some parent-facing bits and bobs here…)
Summary
My research examines the early development of attention and stress. I try to do this based entirely on naturalistic real-world observations of real-world behaviours, and corresponding fluctuations in physiology and brain activity.
I study the development of attention control (our capacity to control where we allocate our attention, second by second) and arousal control (our capacity to change our behaviours to ‘correct for’ externally caused increases and decreases in arousal). I used to think that these both involved executive processes. But nowadays I’m not so sure about that.
But there are still common themes between the two. In particular, I am interested in exploring the time dynamics of attention control and arousal control – taking ideas from how we observe and study weather systems to study how attention and arousal states build up and then dissipate.
And I am interested in trying to identify active processes through which attention and arousal states are either cancelled earlier than they would otherwise, or actively prolonged.
Finally I am interested in how a child’s early interactions with caregivers (co-regulation) and their everyday environments influence how attention and arousal states develop.
Below are some summaries, youtube videos and key publications for each of the different topics I cover. If you’ve got any thoughts or questions about any of these I’m really interested to hear – so please do get in touch!!
Key publications:
Wass, S.V., Phillips, E.A.M., Marriott Haresign, I., Perapoch Amadó, M., Goupil, L. (2024) Contingency and synchrony: interactional pathways towards attentional control and intentional communication. Annual Reviews of Developmental Psychology
Goupil, L., Dautriche, I., Denman, K., Henry, Z., Marriott-Haresign, I. & Wass,S.V (under revision). Infants’ interests and speakers’ social contingency jointly support infant word learning during play. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences
Wass, S., Greenwood, E., Esposito, G., Smith, C., Necef, I., & Phillips, E. (2024). Annual Research Review: Studying interpersonal interactions in developmental psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
Amadó, M. P., Greenwood, E., Ives, J., Labendzki, P., Haresign, I. M., Northrop, T. J., … & Wass, S. V. (2023). The neural and physiological substrates of real-world attention change across development. eLife, 12.
Phillips, E.A.M., Goupil, L., Marriott-Haresign, I., Bruce-Gardyne, E., Csolsim, F.A., Whitehorn, M., Leong, V. & Wass, S.V. (2023). Proactive or reactive? Neural oscillatory insight into the leader-follower dynamics of early infant-caregiver interaction. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.
Wass, S.V., Phillips, E., Smith, C., Goupil, L. (2022) Vocalisations and the Dynamics of Interpersonal Arousal Coupling in Caregiver-Infant dyads. eLife.
Wass, S.V., Whitehorn, M., Marriot Haresign, I., Phillips, E., Leong, V. (2020) Interpersonal neural entrainment during early social interaction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Wass., S.V., Smith, C.G., Clackson, K., Gibb, C., Eitzenberger, J., Mirza, F. U. (2019). Parents mimic and influence their infant’s autonomic state through dynamic affective state matching. Current Biology.
Wass, S.V., Noreika, V., Georgieva, S., Clackson, K., Brightman, L., Nutbrown, R., Santamaria, L., Leong, V. (2018) Parental neural responsivity to infants’ visual attention: how mature brains scaffold immature brains during social interaction. PLoS Biology.
Leong, V., Byrne, E., Clackson, K., Lam, S. & Wass, S.V. (2017). Speaker gaze increases information coupling between infant and adult brains. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.
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Why I do naturalistic real-world research
For my research I don’t do many experiments, as most people do. Instead, I study cognitive and brain functions embedded in real-world settings. Here’s why:
Selected papers:
Wass, S., & Jones, E. J. (2023). Editorial perspective: Leaving the baby in the bathwater in neurodevelopmental research. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
Wass, S. V., & Goupil, L. (2022). Studying the developing brain in real-world contexts: moving from castles in the air to castles on the ground. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.
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Inter-relationships between stress and attention
My particular interest is understanding the developmental interactions between two domains sometimes characterised as at opposite ends of the human spectrum: early-developing arousal systems, that subserve basic mechanisms of survival and homeostasis; and the later-developing ‘higher-order’ cognitive domain of executive control.
As part of this I study how moment-by-moment fluctuations in a child’s physiological stress affect their ability to exercise executive control. But I also study the problem from the opposite perspective – looking at how we use executive control to change our behaviours ‘on the fly’, moment by moment, to compensate for dynamical changes both within us, and in our environments, and maintain stable levels of physiological stress. I am also interested in studying how these behaviours ‘go wrong’, leading to ‘metastatic’, dysregulatory interactions.
Selected papers:
Wass, S. V. (2021). The origins of effortful control: How early development within arousal/regulatory systems influences attentional and affective control. Developmental Review.
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Attention in solo settings
How do babies and children pay attention in a complex, real-world environments? What determines when they shift their attention, and where they shift their attention to? At the moment I am trying to look at this by studying multi-scale dynamics – looking at interactions between slow-scale fluctuations in arousal/alertness and faster time-scale fluctuations in brain activity, and how these are both influenced by dynamic properties of our environment.
Selected papers:
Wass, S. (preprint). Oscillators and inertial dynamics: understanding the development of real-world attention control.
Amadó, M. P., Greenwood, E., Ives, J., Labendzki, P., Haresign, I. M., Northrop, T. J., … & Wass, S. V. (2023). The neural and physiological substrates of real-world attention change across development. eLife, 12.
Attention in social settings
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Children pay attention to things very differently when they are doing things together with an adult. But how, and why, do these short- and long-term influences happen? To understand this I study the microdynamics of how shared attention states are established and maintained. I also use dual EEG and fNIRS to look at synchrony during child-caregiver interactions:
Selected papers:
Phillips, E., Goupil, L., Haresign, I. M., Bruce-Gardyne, E., Csolsim, F. A., Whitehorn, M., … & Wass, S. (2023). Proactive or reactive? Neural oscillatory insight into the leader-follower dynamics of early infant-caregiver interaction. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.
Wass, S.V., Whitehorn, M., Marriot Haresign, I., Phillips, E., Leong, V. (2020) Interpersonal neural entrainment during early social interaction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.01.006.
Wass, S.V., Noreika, V., Georgieva, S., Clackson, K., Brightman, L., Nutbrown, R., Santamaria, L., Leong, V. (2018) Parental neural responsivity to infants’ visual attention: how mature brains scaffold immature brains during social interaction. PLoS Biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2006328.
Leong, V., Byrne, E., Clackson, K., Lam, S. & Wass, S.V. (2017). Speaker gaze increases information coupling between infant and adult brains. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. 114 (50), 13290–13295, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1702493114.
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Attention training
For my PhD I also designed concentration training games for babies, which over the years I have developed and tested with many wonderful collaborators around the world. Just as many other people have found, though, our recent results haven’t been so encouraging, so I don’t do so much of that work now.
Selected papers:
Wass, S., Porayska-Pomsta, K., & Johnson, M. H. (2011). Training attentional control in infancy. Current Biology, 21(18), 1543-1547.
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Stress in solo settings
How do children learn to self-regulate in real-world settings by learning to adapt their behaviours, moment by moment, to maintain stable stress levels in the face of a changing environment? And how can these processes go wrong – leading to ‘metastatic’, dysregulatory interactions? To do this we look at which stress states are the most stable – i.e. the most long-lasting – in real-world settings. And we try to figure out why some states are more stable than others.
Selected papers:
Wass, S. (2022). Allostasis and metastasis: the yin and yang of childhood self-regulation. Development and Psychopathology
Wass, S.V. (2022) The origins of effortful control: how early development within arousal/regulatory systems influences cognitive and affective control. Developmental Review.
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Stress in social settings
Parent-child co-regulation – it’s great when it works…
Through development we transition from co-regulation – where stress states are shared across the child-parent dyad – towards self-regulation – where stress states are managed by children on their own. But is co-regulation just about the adult setting a positive example of how to stay calm, and the child copying that – or is it more complicated? And what types of parental behaviours are likely to associate with best long-term development of self-regulation skills?
Selected papers:
Wass, S.V., Phillips, E., Smith, C., Goupil, L. (2022) Vocalisations and the Dynamics of Interpersonal Arousal Coupling in Caregiver-Infant dyads. eLife.
Wass., S.V., Smith, C.G., Clackson, K., Gibb, C., Eitzenberger, J., Mirza, F. U. (2019). Parents mimic and influence their infant’s autonomic state through dynamic affective state matching. Current Biology 29(14), 2415-2422. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.016.
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Parent-child dys-regulation – it’s not so great when it goes wrong!
We know that stress states spread across parent-child dyads – known as stress contagion. But how does this happen? Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or somewhere in between? And how, specifically, do a child’s developing vocal behaviours trigger stress contagion – for good and for bad…
Selected papers:
Smith, C. G., Jones, E. J., Charman, T., Clackson, K., Mirza, F. U., & Wass, S. V. (2022). Vocalization and physiological hyperarousal in infant–caregiver dyads where the caregiver has elevated anxiety. Development and psychopathology, 1-12.
Smith, C. G., Jones, E. J., Charman, T., Clackson, K., Mirza, F. U., & Wass, S. V. (2022). Anxious parents show higher physiological synchrony with their infants. Psychological Medicine, 52(14), 3040-3050.
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Environmental influences on stress and attention
‘No man is an island, entire of itself.’ Second by second, day by day, and year by year, we are constantly adapting and evolving around the environments in which we live. I use wearable sensors (microphones, cameras) to record the different types of environment in which children spend time, and to measure the influences that these environments have on long-term development.
Selected papers:
Wass, S. V., Smith, C. G., Stubbs, L., Clackson, K., & Mirza, F. U. (2021). Physiological stress, sustained attention, emotion regulation, and cognitive engagement in 12-month-old infants from urban environments. Developmental Psychology, 57(8), 1179.
Wass, S.V., Smith, C.G., Daubney, K.R., Suata, Z.M., Clackson, K., Begum, A., Mirza, F.U. (2019) Influences of household noise on autonomic function in 12-month-old infants: understanding early common pathways to atypical emotion regulation and cognitive performance. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 60(12):1323-1333 doi: 10.1111/jcpp.13084.
Wass, S. V., Amadó, M. P., & Ives, J. (2022). Oscillatory entrainment to our early social or physical environment and the emergence of volitional control. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 54.