Lecture 14 - Exploration and play

Page 2: Learning Objectives

• Familiarize with multi-sensory exploration in infancy, encompassing both independent and social contexts.

• Recognize key theories of curiosity, including:

  • Drive: Biological impulse prompting exploration from an innate urge to learn.

  • Incongruency: The tendency to seek information when there is a discrepancy between expectations and reality.

  • Information Gap: Awareness of lacking knowledge that motivates children to seek answers.

  • Learning Progress: Understanding how curiosity evolves alongside knowledge and experience.

• Identify key characteristics of play, including its voluntary nature, non-functional aspect, and developmental significance.

Page 3: Concepts of Exploration and Curiosity

• Exploration: Involves observable actions reflecting curiosity, characterized by a natural inclination to investigate and interact with the environment.

• Curiosity: Defined as an intrinsically motivated quest for information, distinct from extrinsically motivated searches for rewards or approval.

Page 4: Ways Children Explore

• Visual Exploration: Includes behaviors like preferential looking, novelty preference, gaze following, and sustained attention on intriguing objects or stimuli.

• Manual/Haptic Exploration: Consists of tactile interactions including touching, grasping, holding, mouthing, banging, and dropping objects, showcasing sensory engagement.

• Spatial/Locomotor Exploration: Involves movements towards objects or phenomena of interest, reflecting a desire to engage physically with the environment.

• Social-Communicative Exploration: Encompasses social referencing, pointing, vocalizations, and questioning, facilitating learning through interaction with caregivers and peers.

Page 5: Systematic and Multi-Sensory Exploration

• A combination of spatial and haptic explorations leads to a deeper understanding of objects and enhances vocabulary acquisition.

• Exploration unfolds through a systematic process, involving visual, haptic, and locomotor behaviors, as suggested by research (Franchak, 2019).

Page 6: The Nature of Exploration

• Embodied and Embedded: Exploration consists of organized sequences of behaviors across visual, haptic, and locomotor domains, emphasizing the synergy of these modalities.

• Visual exploration significantly influences how children adapt their locomotion to reach desired stimuli, as highlighted in studies (Kretch & Adolph, 2016).

Page 7: Independent vs. Social Exploration

• Physical Exploration: Focuses on object properties and causal relationships, enhancing cognitive understanding of the world.

• Social Exploration: Involves comprehension of others’ knowledge and intentions, integrating social context into learning experiences.

Page 8: Cognitive Positions on Exploration

• Piaget's View: Promotes the notion that knowledge is constructed through active engagement and self-discovery, with readiness playing a critical role in learning.

  • cognitive construction of reality

  • learning through active self-discovery and exploration

  • learning only when developmentally ready

• Vygotsky's View: Emphasizes the significance of social interactions and guidance in constructing knowledge, catalyzing cognitive growth through collaborative learning.

  • social construction of reality

  • learning through others guidance or instructions

  • cognitive development can be accelerated

Page 9: Information Seeking

• A key distinction exists between informants and non-informants, affecting the knowledge acquisition process, where caregivers and peers serve as critical sources of information (Bazhydai et al., 2020).

Page 10: Multiple Information Sources

• Children often express uncertainty about their knowledge with statements like "I do not know, but I know who to ask," demonstrating their understanding of social resources for information gathering.

Page 11: Scaffolding and Exploration

• Divergent Thinking Measure: Highlights the diversity of actions taken by children when exploring new environments, indicating a range of creative responses to stimuli.

• Research indicates that 2-year-olds exhibit high levels of divergent thinking following adult modeling (Hoicka et al., 2017).

Page 12: Later Childhood Exploration

• Increased competency in active learning contributes to:

  • Enhanced selectivity in exploring objects or phenomena.

  • More effective strategies for engagement, reducing randomness in exploration.

  • Improved quality of questions posed, reflecting deeper cognitive engagement.

  • Development of intrinsic motivation, emotional regulation, and self-regulation skills, facilitating exploration.

Page 13: Curiosity Frameworks

• Four primary approaches elucidate children's exploration:

  • Knowledge Gap: Highlights the drive towards information seeking to bridge understanding deficits.

  • Drive: Connects curiosity to fundamental biological drives, similar to hunger and thirst.

  • Incongruency: Engages children’s need for resolving conflicts in expectation versus reality.

  • Learning Progress: Links curiosity with cognitive advancement as learning progresses.

Page 14: Drive Approach

• Curiosity is linked to biological drives that prompt exploration for potential rewards, supported by a reflexive need to ask “what is it?”

• Uncertainty serves as a catalyst for exploration, compelling children to restore knowledge balance through discovery.

• species-general, basic drive view

• Aligned with other biological drives, such as hunger

• Approach behaviour in anticipation of reward

• Explained in terms of reflexes (behaviourism), e.g., spontaneous

  orienting (“what-is-it?” reflex)

• Low-level heuristics: infants’ gazing at areas of high visual contrast, motion onset, human faces

• Aversive experience? Uncertainty associated with need to resolve it to restore balance

• Pleasant experience? Spontaneous engagement in exploration,

  initiating state of uncertaint

Page 15: Incongruency Approach

• Curiosity thrives on a desire for novelty and complexity, driven by experiences of surprise that necessitate exploration to resolve confusion through questioning and explanation.

• Curiosity as a response to the pronounced preference for novelty, surprise, ambiguity, and complexity, and seeking out deliberately.g., violation of expectation scenarios• Seeking information and explanation to resolve uncertainty, independently and socially (asking questions, offering own explanations of phenomena

Page 16: Exploring the Unexpected

• Research indicates that infants have a preference for unexpected stimuli, reinforcing the significance of surprise in sparking curiosity and engagement (Sim & Xu, 2017).

Page 17: Seeking Causal Explanations

• Infants actively seek out objects that incite curiosity, often exploring to unravel causal relationships when they encounter confusion during their interactions.

Page 18: Information Gap Approach

• Curiosity is understood as the pursuit of knowledge gaps; an awareness of the unknown serves as a prerequisite for stimulating curiosity.

Page 19: Learning Progress Approach

• Curiosity is directly connected to the availability of information and the learner's cognitive state; effective learning surfaces when uncertainty is mitigated and knowledge gaps are identified.

Page 20: Robot Exploration Modeling

• The study of robotic frameworks simulating exploration behaviors highlights principles of active exploration in various environments (refer to the provided video).

Page 21: The Goldilocks Effect

• Infants show a preference for stimuli with optimal complexity, which is neither too simple nor too complex, thereby maintaining their interest and attention (Kidd et al., 2012).

Page 22: Measuring Curiosity

• Gaze-contingent eye-tracking techniques provide insights into curiosity levels, facilitating understanding of attentional focuses within children (Bazhydai et al., 2021).

Page 23: Exploration vs. Exploitation

• This concept involves understanding children's behavioral choices between venturing into unknown categories versus exploiting familiar entities (Altmann et al., 2025).

Page 24: Self-Generated Patterns

• Exploration-exploitation patterns reveal children's underlying learning methodologies and cognitive processes (Altmann et al., 2025).

Page 25: Challenges in Understanding Curiosity

• The field experiences challenges due to gaps in consensus over cognitive mechanisms elucidating curiosity, alongside measurement difficulties.

Page 26: Defining Play

• Characteristics of Play: Include voluntary engagement occurring within secure environments, non-functional outcomes in immediate contexts, and the presence of exaggerated or segmented elements.

• Developmentally, play patterns evolve across childhood, signifying its importance in growth.

• voluntary behaviour

• Happens in a safe environment

• Not functional in the immediately observedcontext

• Includes elements that are exaggerated,segmented, and non-sequential in relation tothe functional behaviour

• Shows a characteristic age progression, peaking
  

Page 27: Evolutionary Basis of Play

• Play is recognized as an adaptive behavior deeply rooted in human evolution, recognized across cultures as a critical facilitator for developing skills necessary for adult life.

• Play is costly: takes up considerable time and energy

• Universal: encouraged by parents and occurs in allcultures Adaptive activity due to long period of immaturity anddependency

• Allows to gain physical, social and cognitive skillsnecessary for adult life

• Opportunity to practice in risk-free environment

• Evolution of play may be linked to evolution ofintelligence: most intelligent animals play (engaging in complex games and social interactions that enhance their problem-solving abilities and adaptability.

Page 28: Types of Play Classification

• Social Classification of Play: Ranges from solitary independent play to various cooperative forms, including:

  • Rough-and-tumble play - a form of physical play that often involves chasing, wrestling, and playful fighting, which helps develop social skills and emotional regulation among participants.

  • Parallel play - playing with their own toys next to other children while remaining largely independent; this type of play is crucial for early social development as it allows children to observe and learn from one another without direct interaction.

  • Associative play - playing next to each other but not acknowledging each other

  • Cooperative play - playing together and doing things together like building a tower together

  • Guided play - a structured form of play where an adult facilitates the activity to enhance learning while allowing children to explore and engage with the environment.

Page 29: Cognitive Complexity of Play

• Different forms of cognitive play include:

  • Functional play (locomotor activities)

  • Constructive play (involving object manipulation)

  • Pretend play (narrative-driven scenarios)

  • Formal games characterized by established rules (Smilansky, 1968).

Page 30: Pretend Play Examples

• Engagement in imaginative narratives through pretend play serves as an essential component for cognitive development, fostering creativity and problem-solving skills.

Page 31: Value of Pretend Play

• Pretend play is crucial for advancing higher-order cognition, enabling skills such as causality and analytical reasoning while also promoting emotional development and socialization.

• Research indicates a robust link between pretend play and various facets of intelligence and creativity, marking it as a uniquely human cross-cultural phenomenon (Callaghan et al., 2011).

Page 32: Paracosms in Play

• Imaginary world creation, or paracosms, flourishes among select demographics, notably undergraduates and MacArthur Fellows, underscoring the richness of imaginative play.

Page 33: Conclusions

• Children’s exploration is identified as a multi-modal and systematic endeavor that is central to their cognitive and social development.

• The integral role of play is emphasized as a crucial element for successful learning and growth throughout early childhood and beyond.

Page 34: Q&A Session

• Open for questions via Moodle and during weekly Q&A sessions conducted on MS Teams.

Page 35: Core Readings

• To deepen understanding, suggested readings include:

  • Bazhydai et al. (2021) on the intricacies of curiosity and exploration.

  • Lillard et al. (2013) examining the impacts of pretend play on various cognitive outcomes.

  • Schulz (2012) discussing the origins of inquiry in early childhood.

  • Weisberg (2009) focusing on the significance of imagination in development.