Play and Symbolic Development Flashcards
(36 cards)
What is Play?
- Play is a spontaneous and voluntary activity
- Done for its own sake
- Enjoyable
- Hallmark of infancy and childhood, but also lifelong
- An indicator of healthy development(like autism)
- An opportunity to learn
-About the world
-About social interaction
-About the self - Many social animals play as juveniles
-Essential for learning how to get along with others
-Foundation for adult behaviors
-Has an impact on neural development - Can you give some examples of infant and toddler play?
Kinds of Play: Object Exploration
Changes with motor development
- Can engage full senses
- Contingent interactions with caregivers → longer and more sophisticated object exploration
- In Western societies, amount and complexity of object exploration predicts other aspects of development(ex atetion,labbeling,perceptional development
- Labeling at moments of shared attention support word learning and learning of object properties
- Cross-cultural differences in how parents interact around play(black and domanic mothers were more verbal, mexican mothers used more gestures)
- seeting indepedently explore more objects then in their bellies or back
Kinds of Play:
Functional Play by 8-9 mos
- Object exploration moves from a focus on a single object, to exploring more than one object at a time and how those objects relate to each other
- Helps develop understanding of the
function of everyday objects - Provides the foundations for relating
objects to each other in new ways –
problem solving - Provides a basis for understanding that objects can be used as tools – tool use
ex:object construction,fitting objects into openings
allows to learn novel uses of object
Kinds of Play:
Symbolic Play
- Using objects, actions, and people to stand for something else(referent) (a particular kind of symbolic play called object substitution)
- Start with familiar objects that share properties; later unfamiliar ones
- Start with single object: advance to multiple objects and scenarios
- Pretend play starts emerging around 18 mos (not putting banana to ear, but pretending to call someone)
- Still cannot recognize when others are pretending, but will engage in pretend play with others if invited to do so
- Children later diagnosed as having autism engage in less pretend play
- Emergence of symbolic play, language, & baby sign. like symbolic play where a thing represents something else- sounds represents something else ( meanings). symbolic play predicts languague development.
- Differences across cultures in how much parents engage in Symbolic vs Exploratory play with their children(aregentinas symbolic,american exploration indicating indepedence priorties or interpersonal ones)
- In Western cultures, amount & complexity of symbolic play related to later language. as in play mothers also use more communication - child as well
Classical Theories:
Dev of Symbolic Understanding: Vygotsky
- Child first learns in interaction
- Symbolic understanding comes from
internalizing “tools” like spoken
language, writing and numbers - By using these tools, words and
numbers become internalized symbolic thought - Zone of proximal development
- because of symbolic play children can do mental representation
Classical Theories:
Dev of Symbolic Understanding: Piaget (Review)
* piaget belive that because children achive mental representation they can them do symbolic play
- The child is active – a
constructivist theory - Nature and nurture
interact - A stage theory:
development is
discontinuous - 4 main stages
Sensorimotor Substages:
sybstage 1
Reflexive schemes: Infants begin
to modify inborn reflexes to make
them more adaptive.
sub 2
Primary circular reactions: begins to produce organized actions
such as reaching & grasping;
repeat them for the sensory effect
sub 3
Secondary Circular Reactions: Infants begins to focus on the effect of their actions on the outside world, & repeat those actions are associate w/an effect.
Beginning to separate own actions from the objects - the foundation of what is self & what is other/object.
sub 4
Combining Circular Reactions: Combine two actions (reach & grasp) in the service of a goal.
Object permanence emerging,
but incomplete.
A-Not-B error: not fully
separating actions from object
Piaget’s A-Not-B Task
can pass in sub 4 but not 3 (when with one cloth)
but if in 4 and have two cloth they will serch in the one they surch before even when they see u puting under the other cloth
in 5 they pass but not in series of hiddings(they are still sensituive to this error)
sub 5
Tertiary Circular Reactions:
Begin to understand that objects have
properties, and that their actions
have effects.
Actively use trial and error in actions to explore objects
sub 6
Mental Representations:
Hold object & its properties in mind –
separate from action: Object
Permanence & Deferred
imitation.
Supports learning from
others.
Substage 6
- Achievement of representational thought
- Understands that objects not only continue to exist, but have stable properties even when cant act on them
- Can represent the properties of objects
- Can plan actions on world in head
- Can use symbols to stand for absent objects
- Enables the acquisition of language
- Deferred imitation in place
object permanace and paiget
stage 1 and 2 : infants make no serch for hidden objects
- stage 3: infants serch for partially hidden but not fully hidden object
- stage 4: infants surch for hidden objects but make the A and B error
- stage 5: infants dont do a na b error but are unable to follow invisible displacement
- stage 6 infants can find objects even with invisible displacement
A and B error: looking for the object in the last place they found it,not where they seen hidden
billargion experiment
children looked longer in the non-expected one because the outcome was unexpected because they remenber the box was in the other side (they would only remenber if they knew the object still existed)
impossible/unexpected: the screen didnt stop in the box. it went throught it
by 4 months children looked longer in the unexpected condition - showing object permanence
But wait – don’t
infants have core
knowledge of
objects?
Including the three
C’s – contiguous,
cohesive, & require
contact
Representation of Objects and Events: Why Do Infants Look So
Smart and Toddlers Look So Dumb?
- Child sees where the barrier is inserted, watches the
ball be released (top left), but until age 3, most randomly open doors - Even with plexiglass between the doors so you can track
the object’s movement, less than half of 2 ½ year olds succeeded - And those were the ones who tracked the movement
- Even w/tracking, 2 year olds failed
- If changed to a looking task - open door for possible vs impossible event (ball in front or on downhill side of
barrier) – DID look longer to impossible - Thus, have the knowledge, but the difficulty lies in implementing (using) that object knowledge!
- That requires “conceptual change” from initial core
object representation to a working representation - And rests on experience, including object exploration in play
A mystery resolved!
- Piaget’s findings are robust – but so are Spelke’s!
- The kinds of experiences and representational change Piaget laid out are consistent with the data from the experiments he did
- But he failed to adequately explain the initial foundations
- It is a ‘constrained’ developmental journey the child takes – giving
conceptual redescription to their initial Core knowledge to make it useable - (he had explained the journey by logic, but it is actually predetermined by the ‘initial state’)
- The infant (and looking time toddler) studies show that the representation
of stable objects is there from the get go - But that experience is required to take it to the next level, to begin to be
useable – and it is that next level Piaget had captured
Preoperational period
2-7years old
-
Toddler has symbolic
understanding/representations,
but not operations yet - So according to Piaget has
trouble distinguishing real from
pretend
-The toy foods in the text
-Flavell’s sponge/rock
-Fear at Halloween - And makes the classic errors in
operations
Other challenges for preoperational thinkers
- Have the capacity for symbolic representations, but…
- Difficult to hold multiple representations in mind at once
- Or, to update a mental representation if they don’t see the change in front of them
- This causes challenges to Theory of Mind (as we’ll cover later)
- And to many other situations – see next experiment
- challange with dual represenation(one thing being/represents two things at the same time
Ganae Experiment: Three phases
- Familiarization Phase w/3 animals, 2 frogs 1 piggy:
- Target “Lucy”; Non-Target “Lucy’s friend”; Distractor “Piggy”
- Played w/them; peek-a-boo; ensured the child knew Lucy’s name
- Then told the child the animals were tired, so put them in a basket, and child & experimenter left the room, & started reading a book in an adjoining room
- Attribution of new information
- Assistant comes into the room carrying a bucket of water & says she is going to wash the table in the original room
- Assistant goes into room with toy animals, and they hear her say, “Oh no, I spilled the water on Lucy”
- Experimenter tells child, “Lucy got all wet! Shall we go find Lucy?”
* Test Phase
* Two animals wet, one of the frogs and Piggy
* Experiment asks the child which one is Lucy?
* Critical question: Will the child update her knowledge of Lucy with info given only verbally?
results
- All but 2 of the children selected a
frog, but big age difference - ** 19 month olds at chance**
- 22 month olds chose the wet frog
-
Only by 22 months were the children able to update their representation
on the basis of information
presented only verbally