Pretending with realistic and fantastical stories facilitates executive function in 3-year-old children

Pretend play as abstraction: Implications for early development and beyond

Humans are the only species that engages in sustained, complex pretend play. As pretend play is practically ubiquitous across cultures, it might support or afford a context for developmental advances during the juvenile period that have implications for functioning in adulthood. Early in development, learning to separate our thoughts from reality is practiced in pretend play and is associated with changes not just in cognition, but in emotional and social domains as well. Specifically, pretend play affords opportunities to engage in abstractions that could support abilities such as perspective-taking, emotion recognition and regulation, and cooperation and negotiation in childhood. In turn, the abstraction skills promoted by early pretend play might underlie creativity, innovation, and our capacity to feel empathy and moral obligation to others in later childhood and adulthood. In fact, because pretend play affords sharing our abstractions with others, it might be an early context for behaviors that ultimately promote the shared abstractions of human culture itself.

Executive Function and Narrative Language Abilities in Emergent Bilingual Preschoolers: An Exploratory Study

PURPOSE

In light of the importance of preschool oral narrative skills as precursors to literacy, this exploratory study examined expressive language skills among emergent bilingual Latine preschoolers using a naturalistic personal narrative task. To understand the factors that support language use in the personal narrative context for this population, we examined the contribution of children's executive function (EF) skills to their narrative language abilities.

METHOD

Children completed two subtests from the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment to measure EF and produced two personal narratives in response to conversational prompts. A series of linear regressions were used to evaluate the relation between children's EF skills and their narrative production ability, narrative organization, and expressive language skills derived from automated analyses of narrative samples.

RESULTS

EF was found to predict children's ability to produce a personal narrative but not the language skills children demonstrated in these narratives.

CONCLUSIONS

The current findings suggest that EF is implicated in emergent bilingual Latine children's narrative abilities. At the preschool age, the contribution of EF to narrative language production is apparent in the global task of producing a narrative, rather than in the organizational or linguistic features of the narrative. As such, supporting both EF and narrative skills might be an important means of facilitating preliteracy among bilingual children.

The Impact of Working Memory on the Development of Social Play in Japanese Preschool Children: Emotion Knowledge as a Mediator

Through enriched play, children learn social-emotional skills necessary for academic achievement and interpersonal relationships with others. Further research is needed on how specific factors associated with social play, such as working memory and emotion knowledge, interact to promote it. Previous studies have examined the association of working memory and emotion knowledge with social play. However, there are no consistent results as to which abilities influence which skills first. Thus, the present study examines the impact of working memory on the development of social play and the role of emotion knowledge in the relationship between working memory and social play. Forty-seven Japanese preschoolers were tested on working memory, social play, and emotion knowledge. Regression analysis indicated that working memory was significantly related to social play. Furthermore, mediation analysis indicated that emotion recognition mediates the effects of working memory on social play. Working memory was found to contribute to social play by improving emotion recognition in children. These results indicate that the pathway from working memory to social play is mediated by emotion recognition and expands previous perspectives on the developmental mechanisms of emotion knowledge in children.

Walking in Her Shoes: Pretending to Be a Female Role Model Increases Young Girls' Persistence in Science

Pretend play is a ubiquitous learning tool in early childhood, enabling children to explore possibilities outside of their current reality. Here, we demonstrate how pretend play can be leveraged to empower girls in scientific domains. American children ages 4 to 7 years (N = 240) played a challenging science activity in one of three conditions. Children in the exposure condition heard about a successful gender-matched scientist, children in the roleplay condition pretended to be that scientist, and children in the baseline condition did not receive information about the scientist. Girls in the roleplay condition, but not in the exposure condition, persisted longer in the science activity than girls in the baseline condition. Pretending to be the scientist equated girls' persistence to that of boys. These findings suggest that pretend play of role models motivates young girls in science and may help reduce gender gaps from their roots.

The Relationship Between Russian Kindergarteners' Play and Executive Functions: Validating the Play Observed Behaviors Scale

Background

Young children's play is theorized to develop executive functions, skills strongly predictive of many later advantages. The current study sought to validate a practicably short play behavior survey for kindergarten teachers (N = 18) and compare the reported behaviors to the executive functions (EFs) of their 443 Russian kindergarteners (M age = 78.6 months; SD = 4.04).

Research Findings

The factor model with satisfactory construct validity and internal consistency included three factors: leadership, play preferences and rule conformity. Analyses provide partial support for Vygotsky's theory that play supports EF development, but particular behaviors were related to different EF components. However, kindergarteners exhibiting more leadership, preferences and conformity overall rated higher on most EF components.

Practice and Policy

These findings do not support the theory that play skills improve unidirectionally with age and EFs, suggesting particular profiles of types of players and complex changes with age. The play behavior survey may be a practicable way to trace different profiles across the early years.

What Are the Kids Doing? Exploring Young Children's Activities at Home and Relations with Externally Cued Executive Function and Child Temperament

Young children spend a lot of time at home, yet there is little empirical research on how they spend that time and how it relates to developmental outcomes. Prior research suggests less-structured time - where children practice making choices and setting goals - may develop self-directed executive function in 6-year-olds. But less-structured time may be related to executive function for other reasons - for example, because less-structured time provides opportunities to acquire conceptual knowledge relevant to using executive function on tasks. We thus tested the possibility that less-structured time is also related to younger children's externally cued executive function. In this remote online study, caregivers of 93 3- to 5-year-olds indicated the amount of time their child was typically spending in various activities while at home during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Activities were categorized as structured (primarily lessons with specific goals defined by adults or an app), less-structured (wide range of activities permitting choice and interaction with caregiver), passive (e.g., watching TV or videos), and primarily physical (e.g., bike riding). Children's externally cued executive function was assessed via the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS). Time and variety in less-structured activities were related to successful switching on the DCCS, controlling for age, family income, caregiver education, and verbal knowledge. Caregivers were more involved in less-structured versus structured activities. Caregiver ratings of children's temperament were related to how children's time was spent. These findings suggest several new avenues for studying young children's activities at home and their relations with developmental outcomes. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Children's Evolved Learning Abilities and Their Implications for Education

In this article, I examine children's evolved learning mechanisms that make humans the most educable of animals. These include (1) skeletal perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that get fleshed out over the course of development, mainly through play; (2) a high level of plasticity that is greatest early in life but that persists into adulthood; (3) remarkable social-learning capabilities; and (4) dispositions toward exploration and play. I next examine some evolutionary mismatches-conflicts between psychological mechanisms evolved in ancient environments and their utility in modern ones-specifically with respect to modern educational systems. I then suggest some ways educators can take advantage of children's evolved learning abilities to minimize the effects of evolutionary mismatches, including (1) following developmentally appropriate practices (which are also evolutionarily appropriate practices), (2) increasing opportunities for physical activities, (3) increasing opportunities to learn through play, and (4) taking advantage of stress-adapted children's "hidden talents." I argue that evolutionary theory informs teachers and parents about how children evolved to learn and can result in more-enlightened teaching methods that will result in a more enjoyable and successful learning experiences for children.