Exploration and play Flashcards
(20 cards)
1
Q
What is exploration (and curiosity)?
A
- Exploration – observable behavioural manifestation of curiosity
- Curiosity – intrinsically motivated, active seeking of information for its own sake (as opposed to extrinsically motivated search)
2
Q
How do children explore?
A
- Visual: preferential looking, novelty preference, gaze following, sustained attention
- Manual/haptic: touching, grasping, holding, mouthing, banging, dropping
- Spatial/locomotor: moving towards interesting
information - Social-communicative: social referencing, pointing,
holdouts, vocalisations, questions
3
Q
Exploration is systematic and multi-sensory?
A
- Spatial & haptic exploration: object examining & sustained attention
- Holding objects leads to word learning: integrated visual + manual
- Infants’ exploration is an organized, efficient sequence of visual, haptic, and locomotor behaviors
4
Q
Exploration is embodied and embedded?
A
- Efficient sequences of visual, haptic, and locomotor behaviors
- Visual exploration prompted gait modifications and
haptic exploration
5
Q
“Little scientists” and “little anthropologists” as explorers?
A
- Cognitive construction of reality (Jean Piaget)
- Learning through active self-discovery and exploration
- Learning only when developmentally ready
- Social construction of reality (Lev Vygotsky)
- Learning through others’ guidance or instruction
- Cognitive development can be accelerated
6
Q
can Scaffolding promote exploration?
A
- Divergent thinking measure: the number of different actions children produced that had not been modelled
- 2-year-olds imitated high level of divergent thinking on the Unusual Box Test after seeing adult demonstration
7
Q
Exploration in later childhood?
A
- Competence in active learning
- Increase in selectivity, efficiency and effectiveness
- Decrease of random exploration and repetitive sampling patterns
- Asking better questions and seeking better explanations
- Developing personal interests
- Motivation, emotion and self-regulation skills
8
Q
what is the Drive approach?
A
- Species-general, basic drive view
- Aligned with other biological drives, such as hunger
- Approach behaviour in anticipation of reward
- Explained in terms of reflexes (behaviourism), e.g., spontaneous orienting (“what-is-it?” reflex)
- Low-level heuristics: infants’ gazing at areas of high visual contrast, motion onset, human faces
- Aversive experience? Uncertainty associated with need to resolve it to restore balance
- Pleasant experience? Spontaneous engagement in exploration, initiating state of uncertainty
9
Q
what is the Incongruency approach?
A
- Curiosity as a response to the pronounced preference for novelty, surprise, ambiguity and complexity, and seeking these out deliberately
- e.g., violation of expectation scenarios
- Seeking information and explanation to resolve
uncertainty, independently and socially (asking WH
questions, offering own explanations of phenomena)
10
Q
Exploring the unexpected?
A
- Infants preferentially look at, approach and explore the unexpected
11
Q
Seeking causal explanations?
A
- Infants selectively approach (crawl to) the objects that trigger curiosity and seek causal explanation when evidence is confounded/unclear
12
Q
what is the Information gap approach?
A
- Curiosity allows to close an identified gap in knowledge on a particular topic
- Directed acquisition of specific and goal-directed
knowledge - But: Cannot become curious about something without having any prior knowledge about it!
- The size of gap affects curiosity, e.g., trivia questions
- Learner needs to be aware of the gap to attempt to fill it
13
Q
what is the Learning progress approaches?
A
- Curiosity as a function of both the availability of information and the internal state of the learner
- Maximizing learning by reducing uncertainty
- Optimal and effective progress in learning
- Learning is intrinsically rewarding
- No need for conscious awareness of information gaps
=> - Computational and robotic models of information search and sampling
14
Q
what is “The Goldilocks Effect”?
A
- Infants prefer visual and auditory sequences of intermediate complexity: neither too highly predictable nor highly unpredictable
- lost interest (looked away from screen) in max or min predictable situations, but sustained attention during intermediate predictability
15
Q
What is play?
A
- Voluntary behaviour
- Happens in a safe environment
- Not functional in the immediately observed context
- Includes elements that are exaggerated, segmented, and non-sequential in relation to the functional behaviour
- Shows a characteristic age progression, peaking in childhood and declining with age
16
Q
what is the Evolutionary basis of play?
A
- Play is costly: takes up considerable time and energy
- Universal: encouraged by parents and occurs in all
cultures - Adaptive activity due to long period of immaturity and dependency
- Allows to gain physical, social and cognitive skills
necessary for adult life - Opportunity to practice in risk-free environment
- Evolution of play may be linked to evolution of intelligence: most intelligent animals play (birds and
mammals)
17
Q
Play: social classification?
A
- Solitary independent play
- Rough-and-tumble play
- Parallel play
- Associative play
- Cooperative play
- Guided play
18
Q
Play: cognitive complexity classification?
A
- Functional play: locomotor
- Constructive play: object play
- Pretend play: dramatic, fantasy
- Formal games with rules: organized games with procedures and penalties
19
Q
what is the Unique value of pretend play?
A
- Historically was viewed as an immature mode of thinking (Piaget, behaviourism)
- Involves making things up from scratch or combining elements in novel ways
- Open-ended, not a goal-directed activity
- Vital for development of higher-order cognition (causality, analytical skills), emotional skills and socialization
- Links with later measures of intelligence and creativity
- Distinctly and uniquely human cross-cultural phenomenon
20
Q
how do you Create paracosms?
A
- Prevalence of engagement in imaginary worldplay: 3-12% among undergraduate students and about twice as frequent among MacArthur Fellows (“genius award” winners) (5-26%)
- Wide range of disciplines: scientists, social scientists, artists
