Kansas-born Pauline Benton (1898-1974) was encouraged by her father, one of America's earliest feminist male educators, to reach for the stars. Instead, she reached for shadows. In 1920s Beijing, she ...discovered shadow theatre (piyingxi), a performance art where translucent painted puppets are manipulated by highly trained masters to cast coloured shadows against an illuminated screen. Finding that this thousand-year-old forerunner of motion pictures was declining in China, Benton believed she could save the tradition by taking it to America. Mastering the male-dominated art form in China, Benton enchanted audiences eager for the exotic in Depression-era America. Her touring company, Red Gate Shadow Theatre, was lauded by theatre and art critics and even performed at Franklin Roosevelt's White House. Grant Hayter-Menzies traces Benton's performance history and her efforts to preserve shadow theatre as a global cultural treasure by drawing on her unpublished writings, the recollections of her colleagues, the testimonies of shadow masters who survived China's Cultural Revolution, as well as young innovators who have carried on Benton's pioneering work.
While puppets have been used to test infants’ and young children’s understanding of agency, social cognition, and learning in developmental psychology labs, most research does not include a critical ...component of puppets for children: movement. In addition to various cognitive affordances, puppets can be used and interacted with in active, physicalized, embodied ways. A wide variety of fields, including theatre, education, and therapy have long used interactive and physicalized puppet play to help children learn, experience art, and express themselves. In developmental science, embodiment and physicalizing of knowledge, particularly through gesture, is known to enhance children’s learning. However, research on whether and how children engage with puppets using embodiment and gesture is missing. Without knowing the levels and types of gesture children use with puppets, theories of puppets cannot be inclusive of both passive and active methodologies. Here, we compare preschool aged children’s puppet play to their costumed role play and their physically passive watching of puppets or media. We ask if children show more gesture while using puppets, if so, what kinds, and whether that gesture affects their learning from vignettes. We find regardless of age or sex, children gesture significantly more while playing with puppets than when watching puppets or media. This level of gesture is similar to when they are role playing in costume. While more gesturing does not predict learning directly, types of gesture, which also differ in puppet play uniquely, do predict learning. These findings have implications for the use of puppets as passive theatrical shows meant to test children’s learning and understanding, and for the use of puppets in developmental research beyond infancy. Taking cues from the applications of puppets in other childhood contexts, children’s movements should be integrated as additional prospects for puppet-based developmental methods.
•Children’s natural out-of-lab engagement with puppets is embodied.•Children gesture more with puppets than when watching narratives.•Children’s puppet play gestures are closer to role play.•Some puppet gesture is associated with learning.
Although adults generally prefer helpful behaviors and those who perform them, there are situations (in particular, when the target of an action is disliked) in which overt antisocial acts are seen ...as appropriate, and those who perform them are viewed positively. The current studies explore the developmental origins of this capacity for selective social evaluation. We find that although 5-mo-old infants uniformly prefer individuals who act positively toward others regardless of the status of the target, 8-mo-old infants selectively prefer characters who act positively toward prosocial individuals and characters who act negatively toward antisocial individuals. Additionally, young toddlers direct positive behaviors toward prosocial others and negative behaviors toward antisocial others. These findings constitute evidence that the nuanced social judgments and actions readily observable in human adults have their foundations in early developing cognitive mechanisms.
Puppets, a kind of wooden figure whose movements are manipulated by artists, were frequently used in ancient Chinese singing and dancing activities and dramas. The uniqueness of substituting human ...beings for puppets has drawn tremendous attention from scholars. However, despite previous research on the long development process of puppet dramas, a considerable number of details remain neglected, and behind these details lies an abundance of complicated religious factors. Therefore, this paper uses several fragments as entry points in terms of puppet dramas’ modeling, materials, craft, rites, function, artists, organization, and other aspects to comprehensively analyze the influence of witchcraft, Daoism, and Buddhism on China’s puppet dramas. This research first unveils that a ferocious appearance and mahogany as a material, both used in puppets, are outer manifestations to reveal the magical power of witchcraft. Next, the rites performed in Li Yuan Jiao using ritual puppets were characterized by mystery in their implication and ambiguity in their religious sect, which was related to the attempt to hide their notorious identities as wizards on the part of the artists. Third, general puppet artists enjoyed a fairly high social status, conferred by their semi-religionist identity and the puppet dramas’ historical status. Finally, the improvement in the puppet-making process and the emergence of skeleton-style puppets embody the secularization of the spread of Buddhism.
That of the Iena di San Giorgio is a popular legend that has become part of the repertoires of several families of puppeteers. Among the plays published around the story of the murderous butcher, the ...one by Gualberto Niemen reconstructs, at the end of the century, the memory of the puppet show he used to take on tour in the first half of the twentieth century. It was precisely one of his shows that inspired Guido Ceronetti to make a modern rewrite of it, which became the first text performed by the Teatro dei Sensibili (1970). Also in the early 1970s, Giuliano Scabia revisits the legend to make it a mythical tale of a world destroyed by consumerism. A comparison between the two versions will show how the story, over the course of a century, is transformed from a moralizing story to an affirmation of the inevitability of evil.
In this article, we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ...ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot deployment. Our results move forward the analysis of political bots by showing that Twitterbots can be effective at rapidly generating small- to medium-sized cascades; that the retweeted content comprises user-generated hyperpartisan news, which is not strictly fake news, but whose shelf life is remarkably short; and, finally, that a botnet may be organized in specialized tiers or clusters dedicated to replicating either active users or content generated by other bots.
Simplicity and validity in infant research Kominsky, Jonathan F.; Lucca, Kelsey; Thomas, Ashley J. ...
Cognitive development,
July-September 2022, 2022-07-00, Volume:
63
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Infancy researchers often use highly simplified, animated, or otherwise artificial stimuli to study infant’s understanding of abstract concepts including “causality” or even “prosociality”. The use ...of these simplified stimuli have led to questions about the validity of the resulting empirical findings. Do simplified stimuli effectively communicate abstract concepts to infants? Even if they do, why not use stimuli more like what infants encounter in their everyday lives? Here we make explicit the underlying logic of using simplified stimuli in studies with infants: Simplified stimuli allow for stronger experimental control and therefore more precise inferences compared to more complex, uncontrolled, naturally occurring events. We discuss the inherent tradeoff between measurement validity and ecological validity, offer three strategies for assessing the validity of simplified stimuli, and then apply those strategies to the increasingly common use of simplified stimuli to assess the development of complex social concepts in the infant mind. Ultimately, we conclude that while concerns about the validity of experiments using simplified stimuli are founded, results from such studies should not be dismissed purely on ecological grounds.
•Research with nonverbal infants often uses highly simplified, unrealistic stimuli.•We address concerns about the external validity of studies using such stimuli.•Infant research must balance ecological and measurement validity.•We give special attention to the case of social cognition studies using puppets.•We argue that these studies shouldn’t be dismissed purely on ecological grounds.
This is a translation from Spanish of the book titled, Marionetas de la Esquina Tras Bambalinas, which documents Las Marionetas de la Esquina, one of present-day Mexicos longest enduring puppet ...theater groups. Its the story of a small groups obsession in perfecting an art form, in this case, one especially aimed at entertaining children.
The use of animations and puppet shows in developmental research has recently been questioned on external validity grounds. Do infants and children interpret symbolic stimuli (e.g., animated shapes, ...wooden circles) as required for a given measure of interest (e.g., as agents)? We review the arguments on both sides and conclude that external validity is not under threat by the mere use of symbolic stimuli. At the same time, the debate in its current formulation runs the risk of masking an important theoretical question: how do infants, children, and adults interpret such stimuli? We present the standard answer to the how-question (symbolic stimuli satisfy the input conditions of the cognitive domain under investigation) and contrast it with the under-explored possibility that these stimuli are interpreted the same way they have been generated (i.e., as representations).
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