From Science Daily: 

“Making play sets more interactive and giving children with autism greater opportunities to control and add content of their own to the game could improve cooperative play with other children as well as giving them greater confidence in understanding how objects interact.

William Farr and Nicola Yuill of the University of Sussex, UK and Steve Hinske of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, explain that children with autism are often affected not only by social difficulties, but also have an impaired understanding of the way objects interact. They have investigated how toys, such as the “Augmented Knight’s Castle” (AKC) might be adapted to be more beneficial to those children and perhaps even act as a therapeutic tool. 

Writing in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, the team,from the Children and Technology Lab at the University of Sussex explains how they have examined childhood playexplains how they have examined childhood play with the popular Playmobil Knight’s Castle play set, which as the name would suggest comprises a toy castle with various obvious components of towers, parapets, a moat and the various model people that can be used in imaginative play to enact various roles within the play set.

The team has thus augmented the play set by adding a wireless networking system and radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) to the components to add feedback and programmable aspects to the play set. The play set might thus produce sound or movement given certain actions by the child playing with the toys. Their tests with autistic children volunteered to play with the AKC reveal promising results that are allowing the team to conclude that such adapted play sets can improve understanding and interest in the play set itself, but more importantly boost the level of interaction with other children playing with the toys. Indeed, the team noticed more parallel and cooperative play and less solitary play with the fully configurable setup for the AKC. They add that autistic children playing with the configurable AKC were also more inclined to actively play with the Playmobil figures.”

This is an interesting concept. I can almost imagine how adding some multi-sensory feedback mechanisms might encourage or even enhance the kind of exploratory play that develops a strong and varied database of object affordances (i.e. cause/effect relationship between an object and its potential purpose), but as an OT and toy connoisseur, I can’t help but feel a bit skeptical, since there already exists a world of readily available toys that can be used in the context of supported play. 

What the researchers are attempting to address is agency: the implict knowledge that one’s purposeful actions have the ability to influence or impact on their environment. (This is, in essence, a primary focus of our approach.) However, I can’t help but think that the researchers have re-invented an unnecessarily complex wheel.

To illustrate my point, I’m pretty sure we have the Playmobil castle floating around the office somewhere; it’s a really fantastic toy for the very few children we see who have good constructional praxis, executive functioning to sustain attention and organize many detailed pieces, fine motor coordination to assemble the toy, fine motor control to manipulate the toy, and emotional regulation to manage the inevitable frustration of mistakes and pieces falling apart. 

As an alternative, we might select the Imaginext castle, which also affords a wide range of imaginative ideas, but has pieces that are larger, more distinctly detailed, and moving parts that are more specific in their purpose. For kids with mild challenges, this provides an appropriate level of challenge while still allowing them to feel successful enough to move from exploratory play to representational and symbolic ideas. 

To further reduce the motor demands, we might choose the Fisher Price Little People (I strongly prefer the vintage version), again, providing toys that provide the developmentally appropriate level of motor challenge to allow the child to demonstrate their ideas. 

It’s also just as likely that we might transform a playhouse into a castle, provide foam swords and stuffed dragons… you get the idea. 

First of all, I’m highly skeptical about the efficacy of prescribing a particular toy to facilitate the development of a sense of agency; by definition, this must be driven by the child’s own innate interests, ideas, and motivation. It seems to me that it would be more effective to consider the child’s natural interests, then match the toy or activity to the child’s individual differences, i.e. their capacity for visual spatial processing, fine motor control and coordination… and then to consider what kind of support might be provided to facilitate their ability to express their ideas, rather than evaluating their ability to play with a toy “appropriately.”

Read the full article here. 

From Science Daily: 

The study shows toddlers between 2 and a half and 3 years old who miss only a single daily nap show more anxiety, less joy and interest and a poorer understanding of how to solve problems, said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Monique LeBourgeois, who led the study. The results indicate insufficient sleep alters the facial expressions of toddlers — exciting events are responded to less positively and frustrating events are responded to more negatively, she said.

 “Many young children today are not getting enough sleep, and for toddlers, daytime naps are one way of making sure their ‘sleep tanks’ are set to full each day,” she said. “This study shows insufficient sleep in the form of missing a nap taxes the way toddlers express different feelings, and, over time, may shape their developing emotional brains and put them at risk for lifelong, mood-related problems.”

This assertion is perfectly intuitive to parents and professionals who work with toddlers, but researchers manufactured the circumstances to observe this phenomenon for themselves: 

 In the study, the toddlers’ faces were videotaped while they performed “kid-friendly” picture puzzles, including those of farm animals, sea creatures and insects. One puzzle each child worked had all of the correct pieces, which gave him or her the opportunity to experience and express positive emotion, she said. A second puzzle had a “wrong” piece and therefore was frustrating to the toddlers in the study because it was unsolvable.

Facial expressions of the toddlers were coded on a second-by-second basis for emotions like joy, interest, excitement, sadness, anger, anxiety, disgust, shame and confusion.

The study showed nap-deprived toddlers completing the solvable puzzles had a 34 percent decrease in positive emotional responses compared to the same children completing similar puzzles after their usual midday naps. The study also showed a 31 percent increase in negative emotional responses of nap-deprived toddlers when they attempted to complete unsolvable puzzles when compared with puzzle-solving attempts after they had napped.

In addition, the study found a 39 percent decrease in the expression of “confusion” when nap-deprived toddlers attempted to put together unsolvable puzzles. “Confusion is not bad — it’s a complex emotion showing a child knows something does not add up,” said LeBourgeois. “When well-slept toddlers experience confusion, they are more likely to elicit help from others, which is a positive, adaptive response indicating they are cognitively engaged with their world.”

(…) 

 “A sleepy child in a classroom or daycare environment may not be able to engage with others and benefit from positive interactions,” she said. “Their coping skills decrease and they may be more prone to tantrums or frustration, which would affect how other children and adults interact with them. This study shows that missing even a single nap causes them to be less positive, more negative and have decreased cognitive engagement.”

They’re currently recruiting families for a study to determine the potential impact on cognitive ability and executive function. 

With the high frequency of sleep disturbances in kids with autism and sensory processing disorders, this suggests another layer of complexity to consider in our assessment and intervention. 

Read the article here. 

From Science Daily: 

Two vital parts of mentally organizing the world are classification, or the understanding that similar things belong in the same category; and induction, an educated guess about a thing’s properties if it’s in a certain category. There are reasons to believe that language greatly assists adults in both kinds of tasks. But how do young children use language to make sense of the things around them? It’s a longstanding debate among psychologists.

A new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the predominant answer. “For the last 30 to 40 years it has been believed that even for very young children, labels are category markets, as they are for adults,” explains psychologist Vladimir M. Sloutsky, who authored the paper with Ohio State University colleague Wei Deng. According to this theory, if you show anyone an oblong, scaled, limbless swimming thing and say it’s a dog (its label), both adults and children will believe it’s a dog (in that category of four-legged domesticated mammals) and should behave like a dog — bark or wag its tail.

The study confirms that many adults do use labels this way. But children do not. “Our research suggests that very early in development labels are no different from other features,” says Sloutsky. “And the more salient features may completely overrule the label.” You insist the swimming thing is a dog. The child weighs all the evidence — and “dog” is no more important than scales or swimming — and concludes it’s a fish.

To test their hypothesis, the psychologists showed pictures of two imaginary creatures to preschoolers and college undergraduates. Both animals had a body, hands, feet, antennae, and a head. The “flurp” was distinguished by a pink head that moved up and down; the “jalet” had a blue sideways-moving head. The heads were salient — the only moving part. During training, the subjects learned what a flurp or a jalet looked like.

Then the experimenters changed some of the features, keeping the head consistent with most of them, and asked participants to supply the missing label. They also showed creatures with characteristics and a name, and the subjects had to predict — induce — the missing part. Both adults and children did best when the head was consistent with the name.

The difference arose when the head was a jalet’s but label was “flurp,” or vice-versa. Then, most of the adults went with the label (we accept that a dolphin is a mammal, even though it looks and swims like a fish). The children relied on the head for identification. Regardless of its name, a thing with a jalet’s head is a jalet.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it seems to call into further question the rote skill-and-drill-flashcard-style learning utilized in behavioral models of intervention. If, developmentally, children are processing the sensory, motor, and affective attributes and affordances of an object in order to learn how to classify it, this would be best facilitated in the context of guided, hands-on exploration with a supportive adult. The study’s authors agree:

Sloutsky says the findings could inform teaching and communicating with children. “If saying something is a dog does not communicate what it is any more than saying it is brown, then labeling it is necessary but by no means sufficient for a child to understand.” Talking with young children, “we need to do more than just label things.” 

The second reason I find this interesting is more speculative; I have often wondered whether many of the hallmark symptoms of autism and the secondary deficits observed in sensory processing disorder, such as language delay and alleged theory of mind differences might be traced back to poorly integrated processing (i.e. rather than thinking of these as primary deficits, that they are the result of piecemeal processing and the resulting spotty connectivity between sensory memory stores). For example, in this case, if a child is taking in the visual shape of the duck, but not forming pathways that connect and integrate that information with the texture of the feathers, the quack, or the characteristic waddle, flap, and swimming motions of a duck, how much more challenging would it be for them to acquire the functional, working hypothesis of “duckness” required to label a novel creature with the label, “duck?”  

Read the full article here. 

From the New York Times:

“In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. Children have lost the clumsiness of toddlerhood and can become physically gymnastic, too, and start practicing their fine motor skills. And because they are still smaller than adults, they can grow adept at a skill like, say, spear-tossing, without fear of threatening the resident men.

Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.

The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.”

Thanks to Sara, for bringing this to our attention.

This is from a New York Times Op-Ed piece from Peggy Orenstein:

Among the “10 characteristics for Lego” described in 1963 by a son of the founder was that it was “for girls and for boys,” as Bloomberg Businessweek reported. But the new Friends collection, Lego says, was based on months of anthropological research revealing that — gasp! — the sexes play differently.

While as toddlers they interact similarly with the company’s Duplo blocks, by preschool girls prefer playthings that are pretty, exude “harmony” and allow them to tell a story. They may enjoy building, but they favor role play. So it’s bye-bye Bionicles, hello princesses. In order to be gender-fair, today’s executives insist, they have to be gender-specific.

As any developmental psychologist will tell you, those observations are, to a degree, correct. Toy choice among young children is the Big Kahuna of sex differences, one of the largest across the life span. It transcends not only culture but species: in two separate studies of primates, in 2002 and 2008, researchers found that males gravitated toward stereotypically masculine toys (like cars and balls) while females went ape for dolls. Both sexes, incidentally, appreciated stuffed animals and books.

Human boys and girls not only tend to play differently from one another — with girls typically clustering in pairs or trios, chatting together more than boys and playing more cooperatively — but, when given a choice, usually prefer hanging with their own kind.

Every experience, every interaction, every activity — when they laugh, cry, learn, play — strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others, and the younger the child the greater the effect. Consider: boys from more egalitarian homes are more nurturing toward babies. Meanwhile, in a study of more than 5,000 3-year-olds, girls with older brothers had stronger spatial skills than both girls and boys with older sisters.

Score one for Lego, right? Not so fast. Preschoolers may be the self-appointed chiefs of the gender police, eager to enforce and embrace the most rigid views. Yet, according Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” that’s also the age when their brains are most malleable, most open to influence on the abilities and roles that traditionally go with their sex.

Traditionally, toys were intended to communicate parental values and expectations, to train children for their future adult roles. Today’s boys and girls will eventually be one another’s professional peers, employers, employees, romantic partners, co-parents. How can they develop skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasize, reinforce, or even create, gender differences? What do girls learn about who they should be from Lego kits with beauty parlors or the flood of “girl friendly” science kits that run the gamut from “beauty spa lab” to “perfume factory”?

At issue, then, is not nature or nurture but how nurture becomes nature: the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them. So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on kids’ potential than parents imagine. And promoting, without forcing, cross-sex friendships as well as a breadth of play styles may be more beneficial. There is even evidence that children who have opposite-sex friendships during their early years have healthier romantic relationships as teenagers.

While I think there’s merit in advocating for more gender-neutral marketing and packaging of toys (I have more than once ranted to anyone who will listen about how Scientific American magazine can be found only on the “Men’s Interest” rack at SeaTac airport), as someone who has an interest in both toys and development, I’m less concerned with the specific traits of the object and more interested in helping children explore the full range of emotional themes and developing ideas with creativity and complexity. Certainly there are toys that more readily afford this, but toys are only the medium through which a child expresses their own ideas and emotional life. I’ve witnessed (and been) a pink-clad princess who fights off mean witches and defeats crocodiles and observed a tender moment between superheroes. The limitation is not in the toys or in the child, but in the expectation of them. 

From Science Daily:

The current, long-standing theory suggests that children learn their first words through a series of associations; they associate words they hear with multiple possible referents in their immediate environment. Over time, children can track both the words and elements of the environments they correspond to, eventually narrowing down what common element the word must be referring to.

“This sounds very plausible until you see what the real world is like,” Gleitman said. “It turns out it’s probably impossible.”

“The theory is appealing as a simple, brute force approach,” Medina said. “I’ve even seen it make its way into in parenting books describing how kids learn their first words.”

Experiments supporting the associative word learning theory generally involve series of pictures of objects, shown in pairs or small groups against a neutral background. The real world, in contrast, has an infinite number of possible referents that can change in type or appearance from instance to instance and may not even be present each time the word is spoken.

A small set of psychologists and linguists, including members of the Penn team, have long argued that the sheer number of statistical comparisons necessary to learn words this way is simply beyond the capabilities of human memory. Even computational models designed to compute such statistics must implement shortcuts and do not guarantee optimal learning.

“This doesn’t mean that we are bad at tracking statistical information in other realms, only that we do this kind of tracking in situations where there are a limited number of elements that we are associating with each other,” Trueswell said. “The moment we have to map the words we hear onto the essentially infinite ways we conceive of things in the world, brute-force statistical tracking becomes infeasible. The probability distribution is just too large.”

I love this. Though the methodology is not entirely clear from the description, the findings suggest what our intuition has always known: children are not just statistical learning machines, but that they are emotionally tuned statistical learning machines. It makes sense that, in order to narrow the overwhelming quantity of incoming information, the child’s attention selects for the most emotionally salient interactive partner (their parents) and event or activity (novel shared experience) to learn about the world. 

Functionally, the moral of this story is that language is not learned through rote repetition or exposure over time, it is learned dynamically in the context of naturalistic, affective interactions with supportive and caring play partners. 

Read the article here. 

From USA Today: 

The U.S. needs to do a better job protecting children and pregnant women from toxic chemicals, says a policy statement out today from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The group says children’s developing brains and bodies are far more vulnerable than adults’ to toxins. And while pediatricians typically spend more time in the clinic than on Capitol Hill, the policy’s authors say they felt compelled to advocate for patients who can’t defend themselves.

The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, as regulates new chemicals being produced and imported, but the AAP suggests that the law is inadequate and out of date.

The current law is so weak that the Environmental Protection Agency wasn’t even able to use it to ban asbestos, says Sarah Janssen, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In all, the law has been used to regulate just five chemicals or chemical classes out of the 80,000 chemicals used by businesses, Paulson says. And although companies are required to notify the EPA about new chemicals, they aren’t require to test chemicals for safety. Only about 15% of these notifications include health or safety test data, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Yet there’s growing evidence that children face real harm from chemicals in their homes, schools and communities, Janssen says. Three studies published last week, for example, found that children exposed to the highest levels of pesticides before birth had lower IQ scores than other kids. Other studies have found that boys exposed before birth to the highest levels of phthalates — chemicals widely used in plastic — were more likely to be born with anatomical defects such as undescended testes.

A study from the Environmental Working Group found that babies are born “pre-polluted” with more than 200 chemicals, including flame retardants, lead and pesticides banned 30 years ago, says pediatrician Alan Greene, who participated in the research.Of the top 3,000 chemicals produced in the USA, only 12 have been “adequately tested for their effects on the developing brain,” Janssen says. 

(…) 

Many children’s advocates say they’re concerned that toxic exposures could be fueling the recent rise in early puberty in girls and a variety of chronic diseases, such as autism, allergies, asthma and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Thank you, Dave, for bringing this welcome news to my attention.

Read the article here. 

By now, you’ve probably seen the “twin baby boys have a conversation” video that’s been making its way around the internet. Besides being utterly adorable and hilarious, it’s also an incredible illustration of a rhythmic, reciprocal interaction that features a rich, full range of affect, prosody, gesture, action, but that is, essentially, wordless. 

This article, from the New York Times Well Blog, highlights some of the developmental capacities on display:

Dr. Camarata says the video is rich with examples of how children develop language. It’s filled with canonical babbling that sounds like speech because it uses vowels, consonants and syllables to mimic words. Although most healthy babies go through the same phase of language development, most of the time the conversation is one-sided because they are interacting primarily with parents or older siblings. What’s special about the twins’ exchange, he notes, is that each baby has a peer with whom to practice language.

“The thing that is remarkable is that they both have this intonation pattern,’’ he said. “It sounds like they are speaking, making a statement, asking a question. They are using those broader markers we use in language.”

He says it’s possible that the twins are re-enacting conversations they’ve witnessed in the family kitchen.

“Children are very clever at watching and learning from adults,’’ said Dr. Camarata. “You wonder if there hasn’t been a conversation between the husband and wife or other people in the kitchen that they are mimicking. The intonation patterns were almost certainly learned from the parents.”

I find this concept the most remarkable of all. Here are two babies who have observed others, likely their parents conversing in the kitchen. They don’t understand the semantic meaning of the words that were spoken, nor do they likely comprehend the nuanced meaning of the gestures and vocal affect, but they are highly attuned to these cues and have determined that “conversation” is meaningful to the adults around them, and therefore, worthy of imitation and exploration. 

Read the rest of the article and find a link to the video here. 

I’m thinking that it’s time to revisit Vygotsky. Sadly, my developmental psych professor was too much the Piaget devotee, who emphasized the development individual capacities within the child, rather than looking at the dynamic interplay of development within the social environment. 

As previously noted, his theory of the development of thought perfectly coincides with Levels I-IV. 

Then, of course, there’s the Zone of Proximal Development, which describes the just-right level of challenge and the gradual grading levels of scaffolding support required to achieve mastery.

I was less familiar with his theories about the psychology of play, which perfectly summarizes the development of play from reality-based action sequences to internal visual representations in levels V-VI. 

The child wishes to ride a horse but cannot, so he picks up a stick and stands astride of it, thus pretending he is riding a horse. The stick is a pivot. “Action according to rules begins to be determined by ideas, not by objects…. It is terribly difficult for a child to sever thought (the meaning of a word) from object. Play is a transitional stage in this direction. At that critical moment when a stick – i.e., an object – becomes a pivot for severing the meaning of horse from a real horse, one of the basic psychological structures determining the child’s relationship to reality is radically altered”.

As children get older, their reliance on pivots such as sticks, dolls and other toys diminishes. They have internalized these pivots as imagination and abstract concepts through which they can understand the world. “The old adage that children’s play is imagination in action can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and schoolchildren is play without action” (Vygotsky, 1978).

This level of processing creates the capacity to project the outcome of actions and future events and improve the child’s capacity for self-regulation, deferred gratification, and impulse control.

And this is just from Wikipedia. 

From Radiolab:

This is a short episode which follows up on a rather controversial concept introduced in the previously recommended Words episode:

In our last episode, Words, we got into a debate about whether kids can think before they have words. For this podcast, Jad revisits that question with Charles Fernyhough, who tells Jad about a theory developed by a Russian psychologist name Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky’s theory describes how words and thoughts move from speech outside our heads to speech inside our heads. 

Personally, I find that this is a narrow definition of “thought,” but that is a theoretical quarrel I will not address here. The most interesting and relevant part of this episode is in the first five minute segment, in which Vygotsky’s  theory about the interconnectivity between the development of language and thought is discussed. To summarize, the development of thought is said to be the gradual progression from the external dialog that emerges out of the interaction between parent and child, to “private speech,” in which the child begins to create this dialog for himself, and finally, “inner speech,” where single words and images conjured in one’s mind serve as shorthand for this kind of dialog. 

What’s beautifully illustrated in this segment is that the foundation for thought exists in levels I-IV: shared attention, mutual engagement, and the flow of communication between parents and children in meaningful play and problem solving interactions!

Listen to the podcast here.