Shape, Action, Symbolic Play, and Words: Overlapping Loops of Cause and Consequence in Developmental Process

Abstract

Human beings are remarkably inventive, possessing the ability to solve problems and to create novel things. This chapter focuses on an early form of inventiveness that has long intrigued developmentalists—what is sometimes called symbolic play, but more narrowly, is also known as “object substitution in play.” The specific phenomenon consists of young children using some object, not for what it is, but as a “stand in” for something else in play—a banana as a phone, a box as a doll bed, a shoe as a toy car. The chapter considers how and why these object substitutions may be linked to language.

Rethinking Conceptually-Based Inference — Grounding Representation in Task and Behavioral Dynamics: Commentary on “Fifteen-month-old infants attend to shape over other perceptual properties in an induction task,” by S. Graham and G. Diesendruck, and “Form follows function: Learning about function helps children learn about shape,” by E. Ware and A. Booth

“…In Experiment 2, however, infants’ use of shape to categorize novel objects was not facilitated by the training events because the relations among object shape, how objects were acted on, and the outcomes produced were not plausibly related to each other (e.g., using a container to push couscous) as they were in Experiment 1 (e.g., using a container to scoop couscous).This manipulation by W&B suggests that the types of relations among actions, objects, and outcomes that infants experience is a crucial component of how infants acquire knowledge about the meaningful relationships between those features. Moreover, these findings fit with recent demonstrations by Smith (2009; Smith & Pereria, in press) that early name learning, the development of object perception, and children’s explorations of objects are linked. Thus, W&B’s data do fit with process-based accounts of the development of the shape bias (Smith, 2001; Smith & Samuelson, 2006).…”

Early biases and developmental changes in self-generated object views

“…The extant evidence suggests that the developmental path to mature object recognition is protracted, beginning early in infancy (Johnson, 2001) but not mature until middle childhood or later (Abecassis, Sera, Yonas, & Schwade, 2001; Mash, 2006; Pereira & Smith, 2009; Smith, 2003) with many potential influences (Smith & Pereira, 2009). The path toward unified object-centered representations begins early (Moore & Johnson, 2008; Shuwairi, Albert, & Johnson, 2007; Soska & Johnson, 2008) and initially may be linked to the visual tracking of objects (Johnson, Amso, & Slemmer, 2003) and later to manual actions on objects (Soska et al, 2010).…”

Is Cognition Enough to Explain Cognitive Development?

“…This presents a context in which the cognitive system as a whole may discover higher order and more abstract regularities within single domains and across domains. This idea has been illustrated in a several computational models showing the powerful consequences of learning multiple overlapping tasks (see Reeke & Edelman, 1984;Rougier, Noelle, Braver, Cohen, achievements may be developmentally related (e.g., Smith & Pereira, 2009). These overlapping integrations may also be crucial to understanding how development builds on itself (e.g., and how, for example, enabling infants to grab objects early (via Velcro-covered mittens) yields advances months later in manual exploration, in coordinated hand-eye action, and even in causal reasoning (Barrett & Needham, 2008;Fitzpatrick, Needham, Natale, & Metta, 2008;Needham, Barrett, & Peterman, 2002;Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005).…”