Professor Sam Wass

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 am interested in the development of attention control (how we choose to allocate our attention, second by second) and arousal control (how we change our behaviours to ‘correct for’ exogenously caused increases and decreases in physiological stress). I used to think that the common theme was that these both involved executive processes. But nowadays I'm not so sure about that.

But there are still lots of 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, effortful 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. There is more information available on my personal webpage and the lab webpage.