RESEARCH
THEMES
At ISEY we study little people to find out the answers to big questions. Here are some of the areas that we’re working on at the moment.
UNDERSTANDING EARLY LIFE ENVIRONMENTS
We know that a child’s life-long outcomes are influenced by the physical and social features of the homes, schools and neighbourhoods in which they grow up. But most of our current methods for studying early-life environments rely on techniques such as questionnaires that provide a single, snapshot (i.e., time-invariant) measure of a child’s environment. At ISEY we have been developing methods to track the real-world environments that children experience, and how they are affected by these experiences, in real-time.
These new techniques are opening up different questions and new approaches to studying development. For example, at ISEY we are trying to move away from using human-defined constructs (such as socio-economic status) to characterise environmental variability - where we (the scientists) decide in advance what is important, by deciding what to include in a questionnaire - and towards more data-driven methods for characterising how environments differ between children by taking intensive, multimodal, long-form recording of diverse home environments, extracting meaningful features, then looking at how these features cluster.
We are also working towards different ways of characterising predictability in early life environments. Environments can be predictable in a variety of different things - including rhythms (periodic features) and contingencies (i.e. things that a child can do which will reliably elicit a response). But we are particularly interested in looking at hierarchical predictability - i.e., how far higher-order contextual factors (such as what time of day it is) predict the lower-order sights and sounds that I hear. It is likely that some children experience environments that are more predictable than others, but very little research currently has studied this.
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Lancaster, K. L., & Wass, S. V. (2024). Finding order in chaos: influences of environmental complexity and predictability on development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
LEARNING TO PAY ATTENTION - IT’S SYNC OR SINK
At ISEY we study how the capacity to pay attention is instantiated in the developing brain. Since we spend almost all of our early waking lives in the company of adults, understanding how social influences operate on early attention is a crucial part of this.
We know from previous research that rhythms, which operate across multiple time-scales, from sub-second fluctuations in brain activity to daily physiological rhythms, are crucial for maintaining stability in the face of change.
Some of our recent work has looked at how brain rhythms are achieved and maintained - both when children are paying attention on their own, and in social settings. Our findings suggest rhythms may from the outside look easy, and periodic, and effortless. But in fact the way they are achieved is highly effortful - and involves continually making micro-behavioural adaptations, and changes in response to our social partner. It’s like a dance: we keep in step with our partners and with the music by continually adapting and changing our behaviours ‘on the fly’.
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Marriott Haresign, I., Charman, T., Johnson, M.H., Mason, L., Bazelmans, T., Begum-Ali, J., Jones, E.J.H., & Wass, S.V. (pre-print). Cortical Excitability during Fixations Drives Frequency-Specific Neural Activity in Children and Adults
EDDIES IN ATTENTION & STRESS
To maintain stability in a changing environment we use regulation - defined as the ongoing, dynamic and adaptive modulation of internal states or behaviour. Most current approaches to studying regulation in everyday settings assume, implicitly, that these processes are fundamentally simple, and logical: if something external to me increases my arousal, then I alter my behaviours to decrease my arousal, and vice versa. This is known as allostasis.
Increasingly, though, we’re realising that things are more complicated than that. First, there isn’t actually that much evidence that we behave in this way at all, at least during early development. Second, there is evidence that the opposite types of process might exist – that both high and low arousal states might become ‘sticky’ in some way – they take on a self-sustaining characteristic which ought not to be expected based purely on allostatic models. Third, there is the question of how we tell apart dysregulatory processes (where someone doesn’t want to be in a state but they lose control of their behaviours so that they end up being in that state anyway – as in panic disorder, for example) from self-regulatory processes (where someone wants to be in a high arousal state, and so effortfully upregulates arousal into that state). Almost all research implicitly assumes that it’s always the former, but at ISEY we’re trying to move beyond that approach.
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Wass, S. V., Amadó, M. P., Northrop, T., Haresign, I. M., & Phillips, E. A. M. (2024). Foraging and inertia: understanding the developmental dynamics of overt visual attention. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 105991.
Wass, S. V. (2023). Allostasis and metastasis: The yin and yang of childhood self-regulation. Development and Psychopathology, 35(1), 179-190.
IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO
“It is through others that we become ourselves” (Vygotsky). Caregivers act as a bridge from the constancy of the womb to the unpredictability of the external world. To help children to manage their transition to independence we enter a dance of mutual regulation, where both partners continually adapt and respond to one another.
At ISEY we are developing techniques from Dynamic Systems Theory to track how these processes develop typically, and how they can go wrong during atypical development. To do this we are studying child-caregiver dyads where one or both partners have clinical conditions such as ADHD, Autism or anxiety. In particular we are interested in studying interactions across time-scales: how fine-grained, moment-by-moment interaction dynamics affects how relationships develop over weeks, months and years.
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Wass, S. V., Phillips, E. A. M., Haresign, I. M., Amadó, M. P., & Goupil, L. (2024). Contingency and Synchrony: Interactional Pathways Toward Attentional Control and Intentional Communication. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 6.
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, 65(4), 481-507.
Smith, C.G., Vaillancourt, K.V., Somers, J.A., Necef, I., Ibrahim, J., Minnis, H., Wass, S.V. (pre-print). Practitioner review: caregiver-infant relationship difficulties and intervention in infancy. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
