What role does playful behaviour and playful thought take in animal and human development? How does play relate to creativity and, in turn, to innovation? Unravelling the different meanings of ...'play', this book focuses on non-aggressive playful play. The authors emphasise its significance for development and evolution, before examining the importance of playfulness in creativity. This discussion sheds new light on the links between creativity and innovation, distinguishing between the generation of novel behaviour and ideas on the one hand, and the implementation of these novelties on the other. The authors then turn to the role of play in the development of the child and to parallels between play, humour and dreaming, along with the altered states of consciousness generated by some psychoactive drugs. A final chapter looks forward to future research and to what remains to be discovered in this fascinating and important field.
Outdoor Learning and Play Grindheim, Liv Torunn; Sorensen, Hanne Vaerum; Rekers, Angela
2021, 2021-07-20, Volume:
34
eBook
Open access
This Open Access book examines children’s participation in dialectical reciprocity with place-based institutional practices by presenting empirical research from Australia, Brazil, China, Poland, ...Norway and Wales. Underpinned by cultural-historical theory, the analysis reveals how outdoors and nature form unique conditions for children's play, formal and informal learning and cultural formation. The analysis also surfaces how inequalities exist in societies and communities, which often limit and constrain families' and children's access to and participation in outdoor spaces and nature. The findings highlight how institutional practices are shaped by pedagogical content, teachers' training, institutional regulations and societal perceptions of nature, children and suitable, sustainable education for young children. Due to crises, such as climate change and the recent pandemic, specific focus on the outdoors and nature in cultural formation is timely for the cultural-historical theoretical tradition. In doing so, the book provides empirical and theoretical support for policy makers, researchers, educators and families to enhance, increase and sustain outdoor and nature education.
The postwar American stereotypes of suburban sameness, traditional gender roles, and educational conservatism have masked an alternate self-image tailor-made for the Cold War. The creative child, an ...idealized future citizen, was the darling of baby boom parents, psychologists, marketers, and designers who saw in the next generation promise that appeared to answer the most pressing worries of the age. Designing the Creative Child reveals how a postwar cult of childhood creativity developed and continues to this day. Exploring how the idea of children as imaginative and naturally creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II, Amy F. Ogata argues that educational toys, playgrounds, small middle-class houses, new schools, and children's museums were designed to cultivate imagination in a growing cohort of baby boom children. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, making creativity an emblem of national revitalization. Ogata describes how a historically rooted belief in children's capacity for independent thinking was transformed from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational ideal that persists today. From building blocks to Gumby, playhouses to Playskool trains, Creative Playthings to the Eames House of Cards, Crayola fingerpaint to children's museums, material goods and spaces shaped a popular understanding of creativity, and Designing the Creative Child demonstrates how this notion has been woven into the fabric of American culture.
Designing for Transformative Play Back, Jon; Segura, Elena Márquez; Waern, Annika
ACM transactions on computer-human interaction,
07/2017, Volume:
24, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Numerous studies have foregrounded how play is only partially shaped by the artifacts that their designers design. The play activity can change the structures framing it, turning players into ...co-designers through the mere act of playing.
This article contributes to our understanding of how we can design for play taking into account that play has this transformative power. We describe four ways that players can engage with framing structures, which we classify in terms of whether players conform to explore, transgress, or (re)create them. Through the examples of three case studies, we illustrate how this model has been useful in design: as an analytical tool for deconstructing player behavior, to articulate design goals and support specific design choices, and for shaping the design process.
Lillard et al. (2013)
have done a thorough review of published pretend play research from the past 50 plus years. However, they did not thoroughly address the reasons why this body of research has ...such flaws as well as the contradictory or minimal findings that call into question strongly held views and published assertions regarding the importance of the role of pretend play in fostering children's developmental progress. This comment addresses 3 aspects of the problematic nature of play research: First, I suggest that the research methods in most of these studies were unable to capture genuine pretend play, instead measuring "playful work." Second, I encourage rigorous research designs to better capture genuine examples of the pretend play phenomenon in order to gain deeper insights into these relationships. Third, I speculate on why pretend play development, as a valued behavior independent of its influence on other areas of development, is rarely undertaken and provide suggestions regarding this research direction.
Full text
Available for:
CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ
The British Children's Play Survey was conducted in April 2020 with a nationally representative sample of 1919 parents/caregivers with a child aged 5-11 years. Respondents completed a range of ...measures focused on children's play, independent mobility and adult tolerance of and attitudes towards risk in play. The results show that, averaged across the year, children play for around 3 h per day, with around half of children's play happening outdoors. Away from home, the most common places for children to play are playgrounds and green spaces. The most adventurous places for play were green spaces and indoor play centres. A significant difference was found between the age that children were reported to be allowed out alone (10.74 years; SD = 2.20 years) and the age that their parents/caregivers reported they had been allowed out alone (8.91 years; SD = 2.31 years). A range of socio-demographic factors were associated with children's play. There was little evidence that geographical location predicted children's play, but it was more important for independent mobility. Further, when parents/caregivers had more positive attitudes around children's risk-taking in play, children spent more time playing and were allowed to be out of the house independently at a younger age.
Play in video games Nguyen, Arthur; Bavelier, Daphné
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews,
October 2023, 2023-10-00, 20231001, Volume:
153
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Video game play is remarkably ubiquitous in today's society given its recent emergence only in the late 1950s. While this fast evolution could exemplify the power of play, video games exploit but ...also extend other types of play. Here, we review a classification of the ecosystem of video games useful in the emerging field of the cognitive neuroscience of video games. We then discuss how video games may leverage different play types, considering first locomotor-rotational, object, and social play before highlighting the importance of role, rule, and pretend play in video games. With an eye toward comparative studies of the neural bases of play across species, we discuss whether video games may fulfil the five criteria from Burghardt (2005) to identify play. Finally, in line with play’s possible preparatory role for adulthood, we review the positive impact on cognition and future learning of action-like video games. Highlighting that not all video games have this impact, we note more granular hypotheses about the biological functions of play are to be encouraged.
•Most adults have played video games with the average gamer being in their 30s.•Video games excel at object/social play with fewer opportunities for locomotor play.•Video games exploit role/rule play fully; pretend play is expanding via sandbox games.•Playing video games is intrinsically rewarding, but external rewards are also carefully incorporated.•Short, regular action video game play can be beneficial for attention and cognition.
In this contribution, we address a major puzzle in the evolution of human material culture: If maturing individuals just learn their parental generation's material culture, then what is the origin of ...key innovations as documented in the archeological record? We approach this question by coupling a life‐history model of the costs and benefits of experimentation with a niche‐construction perspective. Niche‐construction theory suggests that the behavior of organisms and their modification of the world around them have important evolutionary ramifications by altering developmental settings and selection pressures. Part of Homo sapiens' niche is the active provisioning of children with play objects — sometimes functional miniatures of adult tools — and the encouragement of object play, such as playful knapping with stones. Our model suggests that salient material culture innovation may occur or be primed in a late childhood or adolescence sweet spot when cognitive and physical abilities are sufficiently mature but before the full onset of the concerns and costs associated with reproduction. We evaluate the model against a series of archeological cases and make suggestions for future research.
Few species play socially with another species, hereafter called interspecific social play (ISP). ISP involves reading and responding appropriately to social cues of other species, often ...taxonomically remote, and has implications for perception, communication, and cognition. We reviewed information on non-human ISP from both print media and videos from YouTube and Reddit. We found over 200 instances of ISP. The literature predominantly featured wild primates, carnivores, and marine mammals. Carnivores and terrestrial ungulates were common in videos. ISP in avian and reptile species were found in both sources, including instances of playing with mammals. Animals may engage in ISP because it is risky and stimulating, they lack age-appropriate conspecifics, the play motivation is high, or to maintain social bonds in mixed-species groups. Cataloguing ISP uncovers which species are interacting and how. Systematic studies of ISP are difficult and many reports are brief and anecdotal. Minimally, future research should record information about each observation, including the age, sex, and history of participants.
•Interspecific nonhuman social play occurs in the wild and in human care.•Literature review reports interspecific play in primates, cetaceans, and carnivores.•Social media videos show interspecific play in carnivores and terrestrial ungulates.•Reptile and avian species also engaged in interspecific play, often with mammals.•Interspecific play is more common in juveniles and domesticated or captive species.
PDF
