For my research, I examine the question:
How do early interactions with our environment drive the development of executive functions?
I explore how predictability in early environments drives the long-term development of my capacity to voluntarily control how I interact with objects and people around me.
I approach this question in two main ways:
First, I examine interpersonal relationships. We know that some caregivers are more stable than others (i.e., more likely to be a given state given their previous state), and that some are more contingent (i.e., more likely to change their behaviour in response to their child’s behaviour). I investigate how a caregiver’s stability and contingency influence their child’s ability to focus and maintain attention on their surroundings, over short time-frames and longer time-frames. And I also look at how, and why, a caregiver’s behaviour towards a child influences that child’s ability to adjust their behaviours to maintain an optimal arousal state over time.
Second, I study children’s early physical environments. I analyse low-level properties of environments (such as noise levels and the spatial distribution of objects) and higher-level semantic and contextual factors (such as whether specific events or responses are expected in a given context). I explore how the meaningfulness (from the child’s perspective) of events in their physical environment affects their developing ability to engage and sustain attention, and maintain an optimal arousal state.
Key Publications
Lancaster, K.L. and Wass, S.V. (2025) Finding order in chaos: influences of environmental complexity and predictability on development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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 (2024). 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:‘There, the dance is–at the still point of the turning world’–dynamic systems perspectives on coregulation and dysregulation during early development. 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
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.