In everyday discourse, people describe and point at things, but they also depict things with their hands, arms, head, face, eyes, voice, and body, with and without props. Examples are iconic ...gestures, facial gestures, quotations of many kinds, full-scale demonstrations, and make-believe play. Depicting, it is argued, is a basic method of communication. It is on a par with describing and pointing, but it works by different principles. The proposal here, called staging theory, is that depictions are physical scenes that people stage for others to use in imagining the scenes they are depicting. Staging a scene is the same type of act that is used by children in make-believe play and by the cast and crew in stage plays. This theory accounts for a diverse set of features of everyday depictions. Although depictions are integral parts of everyday utterances, they are absent from standard models of language processing. To be complete, these models will have to account for depicting as well as describing and pointing.
In this article, we argue that a predictive processing framework (PP) may provide elements for a proximate model of play in children and adults. We propose that play is a behavior in which the agent, ...in contexts of freedom from the demands of certain competing cognitive systems, deliberately seeks out or creates surprising situations that gravitate toward sweet-spots of relative complexity with the goal of resolving surprise. We further propose that play is experientially associated with a feel-good quality because the agent is reducing significant levels of prediction error (i.e., surprise) faster than expected. We argue that this framework can unify a range of well-established findings in play and developmental research that highlights the role of play in learning, and that casts children as Bayesian learners. The theory integrates the role of positive valence in play (i.e., explaining why play is fun); and what it is to be in a playful mood. Central to the account is the idea that playful agents may create and establish an environment tailored to the generation and further resolution of surprise and uncertainty. Play emerges here as a variety of niche construction where the organism modulates its physical and social environment in order to maximize the productive potential of surprise.
Pretend play has been claimed to be crucial to children's healthy development. Here we examine evidence for this position versus 2 alternatives: Pretend play is 1 of many routes to positive ...developments (equifinality), and pretend play is an epiphenomenon of other factors that drive development. Evidence from several domains is considered. For language, narrative, and emotion regulation, the research conducted to date is consistent with all 3 positions but insufficient to draw conclusions. For executive function and social skills, existing research leans against the crucial causal position but is insufficient to differentiate the other 2. For reasoning, equifinality is definitely supported, ruling out a crucially causal position but still leaving open the possibility that pretend play is epiphenomenal. For problem solving, there is no compelling evidence that pretend play helps or is even a correlate. For creativity, intelligence, conservation, and theory of mind, inconsistent correlational results from sound studies and nonreplication with masked experimenters are problematic for a causal position, and some good studies favor an epiphenomenon position in which child, adult, and environment characteristics that go along with play are the true causal agents. We end by considering epiphenomenalism more deeply and discussing implications for preschool settings and further research in this domain. Our take-away message is that existing evidence does not support strong causal claims about the unique importance of pretend play for development and that much more and better research is essential for clarifying its possible role. (Contains 12 tables and 10 footnotes.)
Migration to Northern countries is becoming increasingly important. In this context, the acculturation strategies or profiles that immigrant fathers adopt play a major role in their adaptation to ...their new life, particularly in the quality of their relationship with their children. The present study aimed to describe the acculturation strategies of fathers who had recently immigrated to Quebec and their associations with their parental engagement. Using a quantitative research design, immigrant fathers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and Latin America responded to various questionnaires. Descriptive and predictive correlational analyses of their responses were conducted. The results indicate that the immigrant fathers in our sample present different acculturation profiles, the most prevalent being integration (30%) and marginalization (31%). Furthermore, fathers who present an integration or assimilation profile are more engaged with their children than fathers who adopt separation or marginalization strategies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
A growing body of research suggests that, compared with single parent-child attachment relationships, child developmental outcomes may be better understood by examining the configurations of ...child-mother and child-father attachment relationships (i.e., attachment networks). Moreover, some studies have demonstrated an above-chance level chance of concordance between the quality of child-mother and child-father attachment relationships, and child temperament has been offered as a plausible explanation for such concordance. To assess whether temperament plays a role in the development of different attachment network configurations, in this preregistered individual participant data meta-analysis we tested the degree to which the temperament dimension of negative emotionality predicts the number of secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant, and disorganized attachment relationships a child has with mother and father. Data included in the linear mixed effects analyses were collected from seven studies sampling 872 children (49% female; 83% White). Negative emotionality significantly predicted the number of secure (
= -0.12) and insecure-resistant (
= 0.11), but not insecure-avoidant (
= 0.04) or disorganized (
= 0.08) attachment relationships. Nonpreregistered exploratory analyses indicated higher negative emotionality in children with insecure-resistant attachment relationships with both parents compared to those with one or none (
= 0.19), suggesting that temperament plays a small yet significant role in child-mother/child-father insecure-resistant attachment relationships concordance. Taken together, results from this study prompt a more in-depth examination of the mechanism underlying the small yet significantly higher chance that children with increased negative emotionality have for developing multiple insecure-resistant attachment relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Does spatial language contribute to the growth of preschool children's spatial skills? Four-year-old children (N = 50) were randomly assigned to a play-only (n = 24) or a spatial-language and play ...condition (n = 26). Their mental rotation and spatial vocabulary were assessed at baseline and several days after 5 play sessions. Children in the spatial-language condition scored higher at posttest on a mental rotation task than those in the play-only condition. The amount and diversity of experimenter spatial language during the play sessions accounted for a significant amount of the variance on children's posttest mental rotation. Significant gains in mental rotation were replicated in a second study (N = 34) with a broader range of play activities and with children enrolled in Head Start. These results show that the facilitative effects of spatial language on spatial cognition are not restricted to the context in which the spatial language is provided. In particular, 4-year-old children's experience with spatial language during play can transfer to promote their mental rotation.
For new mothers, coping with infant distress is challenging. Mothers' self-efficacy in emotion-related parenting plays critical roles in shaping their adaptation and children's development. Research ...on antecedents of maternal parenting self-efficacy has been predominantly based on the global self-efficacy theory outlined by Bandura in the 1970s. Despite the utility of Bandura's theory, subsequent research on emotion-related parenting has highlighted avenues for extending and adapting his model to more adequately elucidate the cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes underlying the development of maternal emotion-related parenting self-efficacy. In view of the basic and applied value of a clearer account of how new mothers' emotion-related parenting self-efficacy emerges and evolves, the increasing amount of research on this topic, and the absence of syntheses of extant studies, we reviewed relevant literature. First, constructs and propositions in prevailing theoretical perspectives are examined for their utility to elucidate the development of new mothers' emotion-related parenting self-efficacy, particularly the implicated cognitive, affective, and behavioral mechanisms and how they work together. Second, a framework is outlined that integrates strengths of various theories to delineate processes underlying the emergence and evolution of new mothers' emotion-related parenting self-efficacy. Third, findings across disparate studies are summarized to provide a foundation for the offered framework. To better inform future research, we demonstrated how to build testable mid-range models with substantive constructs and hypotheses from the proposed framework through deductive theorizing process. We also evaluated the utility of the proposed model for studying new fathers. Last, implications for future research and practice are discussed.
Individual differences in spatial skill emerge prior to kindergarten entry. However, little is known about the early experiences that may contribute to these differences. The current study examined ...the relation between children's early puzzle play and their spatial skill. Children and parents (n = 53) were observed at home for 90 min every 4 months (6 times) between 2 and 4 years of age (26 to 46 months). When children were 4 years 6 months old, they completed a spatial task involving mental transformations of 2-dimensional shapes. Children who were observed playing with puzzles performed better on this task than those who did not, controlling for parent education, income, and overall parent word types. Moreover, among those children who played with puzzles, frequency of puzzle play predicted performance on the spatial transformation task. Although the frequency of puzzle play did not differ for boys and girls, the quality of puzzle play (a composite of puzzle difficulty, parent engagement, and parent spatial language) was higher for boys than for girls. In addition, variation in puzzle play quality predicted performance on the spatial transformation task for girls but not for boys. Implications of these findings as well as future directions for research on the role of puzzle play in the development of spatial skill are discussed.
Multiple lines of research indicate that fathers often treat boys and girls differently in ways that impact child outcomes. The complex picture that has emerged, however, is obscured by ...methodological challenges inherent to the study of parental caregiving, and no studies to date have examined the possibility that gender differences in observed real-world paternal behavior are related to differential paternal brain responses to male and female children. Here we compare fathers of daughters and fathers of sons in terms of naturalistically observed everyday caregiving behavior and neural responses to child picture stimuli. Compared with fathers of sons, fathers of daughters were more attentively engaged with their daughters, sang more to their daughters, used more analytical language and language related to sadness and the body with their daughters, and had a stronger neural response to their daughter's happy facial expressions in areas of the brain important for reward and emotion regulation (medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex OFC). In contrast, fathers of sons engaged in more rough and tumble play (RTP), used more achievement language with their sons, and had a stronger neural response to their son's neutral facial expressions in the medial OFC (mOFC). Whereas the mOFC response to happy faces was negatively related to RTP, the mOFC response to neutral faces was positively related to RTP, specifically for fathers of boys. These results indicate that real-world paternal behavior and brain function differ as a function of child gender.
Learning from others allows young children to acquire vast amounts of information quickly, but doing so effectively also requires epistemic vigilance. Although preschool-age children have some ...capacity to engage in such processes, they often have trouble resisting information from misleading informants. The present research takes a novel strategic deception training approach to addressing this limitation. The approach is grounded in theoretical work on children's recognition of self-other equivalences (Meltzoff, 2007) and in the default tendency to view communication as helpful (Mascaro et al., 2017). Eighty 3-year-old Singaporean children (Mage = 39.36 months, 37 girls, 90.0% Chinese) were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition, in which they were trained on strategic deception, or to a conservation training control condition. Findings showed that the strategic deception training was effective in promoting epistemic vigilance on a semantic task that involved object naming and no pointing, although the effect did not extend to performance on an episodic task that involved pointing to object locations. These findings provide the first evidence of a causal link between young children's reasoning about how to deceive others and their resistance to being misled by others. In doing so, they shed light on the mechanisms that come into play when children learn epistemic vigilance.
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