Pretend play with objects: an ecological approach

Abstract

The ecological approach to object pretend play, developed from the ecological perspective, suggests an action-and affordance based perspective to account for pretend object play. Theoretical, as well as empirical reasons, support the view that children in pretense incorporate objects into their play in a resourceful and functionally appropriate way based on the perception of affordances. Therefore, in pretense children are not distorting reality but rather, they are perceiving and acting upon action possibilities. In this paper, we argue for the viability of an ecological theoretical framework to pretend object play which has been traditionally understood as a representational and metarepresentational ability. We discuss the origins and basic assumptions of the ecological approach to pretense. We layout details by presenting a qualitative analysis of a pretend play episode and discuss the results of an experimental study inspired by the ecological assumptions. We discuss pretend object play in the context of ecological work on tool use. We address the relationship between the enactive and the ecological approaches to pretend play, pointing out similarities as well as differences. We conclude that ecological and enactive approaches have shown that it is possible to challenge accepted interpretations and seek explanatory frameworks that could move the field in new directions Keywords Ecological account of pretense • Enactive account of pretense • Pretend object play • Non-representational account of pretend play • Ecological Psychology

Situating the KTA gap in clinical research: Foregrounding a discontinuity in practices

“…The next step is to re-articulate this new perspective in practice. This means exploring the connection between ecological psychology and enactivism, and STS, where ecological psychology and enactivism could focus on the experiential and normative aspects of coordination among different practices, as already happens in the context of other kinds of practices, such as architecture (Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014;Rietveld and Brouwers, 2017;van Dijk andRietveld, 2017, 2021), pretend play (Szokolszky and Read, 2021;Murphy, 2022), education (Young, 2004;Gresalfi et al, 2012;Phillips and Finn, 2022), and many others. On the contrary, STS could provide the methods for studying the practices themselves, e.g., through ethnography and qualitative research (Latour and Woolgar, 1979;Latour, 1987;Mol, 2002;Greiffenhagen et al, 2011).…”

Alternative Object Use in Adults and Children: Embodied Cognitive Bases of Creativity

“…It has been shown that to be used instead of another one, a prop in pretend play should afford the same action or gesture as a missing object 11 (El'konin, 1978;Vygotsky, 1983; see also Landau et al, 1988;Smith, 2005). Hence, in pretend play involving object substitution, a child has to first perceive a particular affordance of the prop (Dent-Read, 1997;Szokolszky and Read, 2021).…”