JohnSB

Everything to Play For

Why development may need repetition, exploration and a world that answers back

By John Siraj-Blatchford

What is play for?

We often answer this question by listing the things children may learn while playing. Play supports language. Play develops social skills. It promotes creativity, problem solving, physical development and, increasingly, self-regulation. Much of this may be true. But lists of outcomes do not really explain play.

They tell us what may happen during play. They do not explain why play should have become such a persistent feature of human development.

Perhaps we have been looking at the question from the wrong end.

A developing organism must proceed into a future it cannot fully predict. The particular obstacles, materials, other organisms and opportunities it will encounter cannot all be known in advance. How does development proceed when the path ahead is not already available as a plan?

To explore that question, I want to begin not with children, but with one of the most influential images in developmental biology.

Waddington’s developmental landscape

C. H. Waddington’s epigenetic landscape remains one of the most influential images of development.

In the familiar picture, a ball rolls down a landscape of branching valleys. As development proceeds, some routes become increasingly canalised and other possibilities become less readily available (Waddington, 1957).

The image was important because it displaced any simple idea that a gene directly determines a final outcome. Development has a history. Genetic and environmental influences affect the route taken, and where development has already gone helps condition where it can go next.

Waddington later used the term chreod for a canalised developmental pathway. He also distinguished homeorhesis from homeostasis. Homeostasis refers to the maintenance or recovery of a relatively stable state. Homeorhesis refers to stability within change: the tendency of a developing system to maintain or regain its trajectory.

These are concepts of organised flow, not of passive movement through a finished landscape.

The surface of Waddington’s familiar landscape should therefore not be treated as an independently existing terrain. Nor should the ball be interpreted too literally. A marble remains a marble whichever valley it enters. An embryo does not. It changes continuously as cells divide, differentiate, move and enter new relations. Its previous development affects what it can subsequently become, which signals it can respond to and what forms of organisation remain possible.

A dynamic rendering of Waddington’s epigenetic landscape. Both the developing form and the landscape change as development proceeds.

Development changes the participant, and the field of possibilities through which further development proceeds...

A path made in the walking

For thinking about learning and cognitive development, a water channel may provide a better image.

Imagine water moving down a hillside. Its earliest passage may be dispersed and irregular. The gradient, vegetation, soil structure, obstructions and saturation of the ground all influence where it flows. But the water also alters the terrain. It erodes some surfaces, deposits material elsewhere and begins to form channels.

Later flows are more likely to enter some of those channels. Repeated passage may deepen them, increasing the probability that subsequent water will take a similar route. Yet the flow may also encounter an obstruction, overflow an existing channel or open another route.

The pathway is neither dictated by the landscape alone nor created by the water alone. It emerges through their continuing relation.

Living development adds another dimension. A stream changes the terrain but remains water. A developing organism is itself transformed through the journey.

An embryo differentiates. A root grows and changes its own position. A neuronal growth cone extends an axon behind it. A child acquires new bodily, social, material and symbolic possibilities.

Cellular exploration within development

The more we learn about developmental plasticity, the less satisfactory it becomes to imagine genes as a blueprint containing a detailed description of the organism to be constructed. Genes are indispensable, but development arises through gene activity in cellular, bodily and environmental contexts. Biological inheritance does not have to specify every particular encounter or route in advance. West-Eberhard (2003, 2005), among others, has argued forcefully against treating organisms as genetically programmed.

At the cellular level, movement does not always begin with a destination being selected and a route then executed.

Andrew and Insall (2007), studying chemotaxis in Dictyostelium (the movement of cells in slime mold), found that in shallow chemical gradients directional movement could arise through biased choices among protrusions. New pseudopods were commonly produced through the splitting of existing ones. The chemical gradient did not have to specify, in advance, the exact point at which the next protrusion should appear. Instead, recurrent protrusive activity generated possibilities, and local conditions biased which possibilities were continued.

A separate imaging study makes this exploratory motion at the cellular surface strikingly visible. Leijnse and colleagues (2022) showed filopodia (the finger-like protrusions of cells) growing, shrinking, twisting, buckling and sweeping through three-dimensional extracellular space.

Filopodia actively explore the space surrounding a cell. They extend, withdraw, rotate and bend rather than simply following a route specified in advance.
Open animation / source

The motion is distinctive…

No complete route is identified and then followed. The movement generates possibilities for encounter. Local conditions will vary. Some movements continue; others do not.

The activity recurs. The encounter changes what the next activity can become..

This does not make genes unimportant. It suggests something more interesting. Biological inheritance may organise the means through which possibilities are generated and responded to without specifying every particular pathway that development will take.

Genes may help construct the dancer and its repertoire. They need not encode every step…

The spiral dance

This developmental pattern becomes dramatically visible in the growth of plant roots.

A root growing through soil encounters an extraordinarily heterogeneous environment. Particles vary in size. Soil is compacted unevenly. Water and nutrients are irregularly distributed. Stones and other obstacles interrupt possible routes.

The root cannot know in advance where an opening will be.

Taylor and colleagues (2021) provide a remarkable visual illustration. Growing rice roots engage in a recurrent helical movement known as circumnutation. In time-lapse footage, the root tip appears to perform a slow spiral dance as it grows.

A growing rice root performs a recurrent spiral movement known as circumnutation. The movement helps the root encounter openings in an unpredictable substrate.
(Taylor et al. 2021, Movie S1).

The wild-type roots show striking helical circumnutation. The hk1 mutants grow much more predominantly downwards.

At first glance, the movement may look inefficient.

Why not simply grow downwards in a straight line?

But that question only makes sense if the destination and the conditions of travel are already known. A straight line is efficient when the route is known. The root’s problem is precisely that it is not.

Taylor and colleagues compared ordinary rice roots with mutant roots in which circumnutation was greatly reduced. The difference mattered when roots encountered obstacles and heterogeneous substrates.

Roots grow through a 1.5 cm gravel layer towards gel below. (Taylor et al., 2021, Movie S10).

In the gravel experiment, 77 per cent of the wild-type roots penetrated into the gel layer below, compared with 48 per cent of the less-circumnutating mutants (Taylor et al., 2021).

The spiral is not wasted movement around the real path.

The spiral movement helps find the path.

Recurrent movement repeatedly brings the growing tip into contact with slightly different conditions. Resistance and possibility are encountered from shifting positions. The root grows through the encounter, and every increment of growth changes the location from which the next movement begins.

The movement repeats but neither the encounter, nor the traveller remains the same..

This suggests a more general developmental principle. Repetition need not be the opposite of progress. What appears repetitive from the perspective of a predetermined destination may be systematic exploration where the destination cannot yet be known.

The dance continues inside us

It would be easy to treat the root as merely a convenient botanical metaphor for human development. But a recognisable organisational principle is also visible within the developing nervous system.

At the growing end of an axon is a highly motile structure known as a growth cone. Developing neurites, tipped by growth cones, encounter guidance cues as neural pathways form. Growth cones extend filopodia that probe, attach, move and withdraw.

Tamada and colleagues (2010) used three-dimensional time-lapse microscopy to document the dynamics of hippocampal growth-cone filopodia. Individual filopodia showed autonomous screw-like rotation. The authors explicitly discuss filopodia as structures that sample the external environment for guidance cues and suggest that rotational movement may increase the volume of extracellular matrix that each filopodium can probe.

Filopodia on a neuronal growth cone rotate and explore the surrounding extracellular space as a developing neurite changes direction. The time-lapse shows a hippocampal neuronal growth cone migrating in three-dimensional collagen gel.
Open animation / source

A plant root and a neuronal growth cone are not biologically identical. The mechanisms differ, and a resemblance in movement does not establish homology.

But the organisational recurrence is difficult to ignore.

Each involves recurrent activity within a structured but incompletely specified field. Each encounter alters the developing system and the position from which further activity proceeds.

The path emerges in the going, while the traveller is transformed in the travelling.

Development has not suddenly become Cartesian because we have entered the nervous system. There is no obvious reason to assume that cognitive development must begin from an entirely different logic.

Watch a child at play

Sand-and-water play typically shows recurrent exploratory engagement. The broad pattern of activity persists, while the affordances and resistances encountered vary with materials, tools, flows and social participation.

Recurrent play is not exact repetition. Each return varies the relation among the child, the materials, the tools and the effects produced.

To an adult expecting development to proceed as a linear curriculum, the activity can appear repetitive. The child is doing the same thing again and again. Surely it is time to move on?

But now think again about the root…

The child carries a wooden block. A bucket. Sand. Water. An object that is too heavy. A container that spills. Something another child believes belongs to them. A large object that will not pass through the available gap. Something that requires another child’s help.

The pattern repeats. Each encounter changes the child, the materials and what becomes possible next.

Recurrent activity provides continuity while materials, forces, spaces, artefacts and other people provide variation. The child repeatedly re-enters a world that answers differently, but never from exactly the same developmental position.

The child does not need to possess, in advance, the concepts that may eventually become available through these encounters. Weight, volume, distance, containment, obstruction, ownership, cooperation and loss are not necessarily the starting instructions for the activity. They become differentiated within participation.

This is why I have come to define play as:

Free participation in a world that answers back.

The word free matters. It does not mean detached from structure, resistance or constraint. Quite the opposite.

Objects fall. Water spills. Structures collapse. Bodies tire. Other children object. Rules emerge.

The world answers back…

What is not fully specified in advance is the particular pathway of engagement. The child remains able to revisit, vary, redirect and combine activity.

Like the spiralling root, the child may appear to take an unnecessarily indirect route only if we assume that someone already knows exactly where development should go.

What if this is what play is for?

I want to suggest a hypothesis.

Play may be an evolutionary answer to the impossibility of prediction.

A developing human cannot be genetically supplied with advance knowledge of every social, material and cultural environment they will inhabit. Evolution could not have specified the smartphone, the supermarket, the traffic light, the written number system, or the rules of cricket.

Nor is it enough simply to say that culture fills in what genes leave blank. The child must participate in cultural environments that are themselves changing, internally differentiated and often unpredictable.

What evolution can conserve are organised means of entering into differentiated environments and finding out what they afford.

From cellular protrusion, to the circumnutating root, to the probing growth cone, biology repeatedly shows us organised activity generating contact with conditions that cannot be fully specified beforehand.

I am not claiming that these are the same mechanisms. I am suggesting that they prepare us to recognise a developmental pattern that is easy to miss when we look at children.

Play is nature’s way of enabling the child to develop in a world that cannot be predicted in advance.

Its recurrent movements may look wasteful from the perspective of a curriculum that already knows its destination. But development has a different problem.

It must find ways forward in a world it cannot completely predict.

NOTE: In the embodied and ecological extension of canalisation that is proposed here, the term refers to the increasing robustness and revisitable availability of a developmental pathway of participation. This is not simply a neural track inside the child. It is a historically formed relation among bodily action, attention, affect, materials, language, other people and institutional arrangements. Neural changes are involved, but they are one material stratum within this wider developmental history.

What, then, is the adult for?

The educational implications of this argument are easily misunderstood.

It is not an argument that adults should stand back and let development take its natural course. Water will make a channel, but not every channel takes it somewhere we would wish it to go.

Imagine instead the possibility of adults and children participating in the co-construction of developmental pathways. The educator cannot prescribe the route in advance, but neither are they absent from the conditions through which a pathway becomes possible.

We can also think of constructing ‘flood-relief’ channels.

When water has repeatedly followed one route, telling it to flow elsewhere achieves very little. The existing channel has become a path of least resistance. Effective intervention changes the conditions of flow. Another route is opened, made accessible and repeatedly available. With sufficient passage, the new channel may itself deepen and become increasingly easy to revisit.

The adult can help make another pathway available.

Consider conflict between young children.

One child wants an object held by another. Grabbing has worked before. Shouting recruits adult attention. Pushing removes an obstacle. These need not be calculated strategies. They are immediately available pathways of activity, strengthened by histories of use and consequence.

An adult may prohibit them:

“Don’t grab. Use your words.”

But instruction alone does not necessarily create a revisitable alternative pathway.

HighScope’s approach to conflict resolution offers a useful example. The adult approaches calmly and stops hurtful actions; acknowledges feelings; gathers information; restates the problem; asks for ideas and supports the children in choosing a solution; and remains available for follow-up support (HighScope, 2018).

The educational significance does not depend on children memorising a six-step verbal routine and executing it independently.

At the point where conflict occurs, the adult repeatedly makes another organisation of participation available.

Feelings can be acknowledged. Different accounts can be heard. The problem can become available for shared attention. Possible actions can be generated. A solution can be tried.

Conflict happens again. But the history from which the next encounter begins is no longer quite the same.

At first the alternative route may require substantial adult participation. It may be shallow and easily abandoned. Yet recurrent participation can make it increasingly revisitable.

The adult, in this sense, helps to cut a flood-relief channel.

This is not canalisation acting as a pedagogical technique. It is pedagogy contributing to the conditions through which an alternative pathway may become selectively stabilised.

It also helps us move beyond a sterile choice between direct instruction and standing back from children’s activity. The educator participates in the developmental landscape. Their words, responses, routines, artefacts and organisation of the environment alter the conditions under which activity proceeds. The child’s response, in turn, alters what the adult can appropriately do next.

Sometimes the educator teaches directly. Sometimes they introduce a material, alter a space, join an activity, bring children into relation, offer language, tell a story or protect the time required for a pathway to be revisited.

The pedagogical question is therefore not simply:

What should I tell the child to do?

Nor is it only:

What is the child interested in doing?

It is also:

What pathways are being made here, and what alternative pathways might my participation help to make available?

That question changes the meaning of repetition. It changes the meaning of provision. And it changes the role of the educator.

Everything to play for

The embryo transforms.

The cell extends.

The root spirals.

The growth cone probes.

The child plays.

And the educator participates.

The biological mechanisms are different. The comparisons should not be mistaken for claims of identity. Yet across these levels we can recognise a recurrent developmental problem.

Where the future pathway cannot be completely known in advance, development requires ways of generating encounters with possibilities.

Differential conditions answer back.

Some pathways become increasingly robust and revisitable.

History changes what can happen next.

Perhaps play has been difficult to explain because we have kept asking which particular outcome it produces.

The better question may be what kind of developmental problem play solves.

A developing child must proceed in a world they cannot completely predict.

They need ways of finding openings.

They need, sometimes, to dance.

And adults need to understand that the most important pathway may not be the one we drew before the child began.

That is why we have everything to play for.

Watch with Mother…and with Dad, Brother, Sister, Nan, Grandad…

When considering the use of technology with young children today it is worth considering how it all began. The BBC launched their first TV programme for under 5 year olds in 1952:. It was called Watch with Mother. In fact one of my oldest memories is of watching The Flower Pot Men with my Mum. Yet research from the UK, the USA and Australia is now showing that many infants now watch TV almost exclusively on their own. The most significant challenge for early childhood technology designers has often been considered to be the challenge of providing the child with independent accessibility, so that they can play (and learn) on their own. Yet the consequences of encouraging such passive viewing or gaming as increasingly now identified by the research, are stark.

One major study found that 10% of children who were watching an average of 2.2 hours of television per day at age one, and 3.6 hours at age three had attention problems at age seven. Many more studies show correlations between TV viewing and obesity. Yet it doesn’t have to be like that. Research shows that when parents watch programmes with their children, the children tend to watch less television, and they also gain more from the experience. The same principles apply to other ICT applications in the home, and our experience with Made in Me showed us that computer software can be developed specifically for the purpose of adults and children sharing the playful learning experience.

The key lessons to be learned from the case of television is in fact transferable to all screen-based media: Where there have been problems, they have not been the result of the media or the technology itself, but the way in which they are sometimes being used or designed for the wrong purposes.

What is AI?

To appreciate the challenges and opportunities afforded by artificial intelligence (AI), it is at first important to recognize that the advances that we are currently seeing are not the result of new technological or computer science innovations such as increases in digital processing power or memory capacity. In the development of AI, the challenge has always been to create machine learning systems that model the capability of the human mind, and the recent AI breakthroughs are the result of our better understandings of human cognition. In fact AI may be considered to have increasingly provided a practical laboratory test bed for the development of our cognitive science.

The AI revolution that is now taking place offers computer applications that provide human-like performance in a wide range of contexts. A major benefit is that computer can recall and process vast quantities of data, far more than any single human. Computers also don’t get bored, tired, or distracted, they can work around the clock.

AI researchers have been teaching AI to learn as children learn (Hutson, 2018), and as early years educators, one way that we can begin to appreciate how the latest versions of generative AI actually work is to consider what it is that we know about how children learn. Children are emersed in an ocean of language from birth and as they come to interpret (recognise the significance) of words being spoken in particular sequences, they also progressively learnt to pay closer attention to the ways in which particular words are commonly used (the synonyms, the common grammatical rules applied, the use of tense). This general knowledge about how language is commonly structured supports their emerging comprehension and understandings of meaning (Buckley, 2003, p12). This is a process that is accelerated significantly as they develop reflexive self-attention, and to words that often occur in combination and in particular contexts.

As early years educators, we also know a lot about how children learn to read, and how we all learn through reading. We all know there is a lot more to reading than learning the phonemes of letters, and that our comprehension of a text, the meanings that we derive from it, accumulates as information is sequentially introduced and combined. Paulson and Freeman (2003) tracked the eye movements that are used in the process of reading. We typically follow the red arrows – we don’t ‘read’ the letter sounds – we don’t even look at each word – we work out what it says as we go along… We look for meaning in the text.

Apparently we typically skip over 15% of all content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and 65% of all function words (prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and pronouns (Paulson and Freeman, 2003).

As we continue to read, our short-term memory must be continually employed to retain key words if we are to understand e.g. the significance of it being ‘new’ and ‘red’, to Mark’s subsequent reporting it being stolen. If later in the text we learn that Mark sees his bicycle in a neighbours garden, our understanding will have required the elaboration of our short-term memory to have been sequentially revised to include the fact that the new ‘red bike was stolen’. These feedback loops, that are required in comprehension are referred to in the literature as ‘recurrent neural networks’ and they are sequential in nature. But some of the information is more important and we might be distracted or confused by information related to the park, the tree and the slide. The amount of information we can temporarily hold in consciousness at any given time is also severely limited. We therefore need to reduce the ‘cognitive load’ (Sweller, 1988) by paying special ‘attention’ to some of the information, and being ‘self-attentive’ in identifying (or predicting) the relevance of new information to emerging understandings. This is a capability that progressively develops in early childhood.

As Piaget showed us, while a child may initially assume (learn) that there is a meaningful (transductive) relationship between coinciding yet entirely independent events, it will only be through future conflicting experiences that their learning can develop. A small child may, for example, believe that ‘dogs live in the park’, and it will only be as the result of a conflicting experience, e.g. of finding a dog living in a neighours home, that this invalid assumption is corrected. If the child is especially surprised it will due to the frequency of the prior confirming experiences. In advanced machine learning, confirming and conflicting data is provided by the very large data sets that is input in their ‘training’. The Chat GPT-3 AI, that can write jokes and poetry, and can write computer code, and engage in conversations with you, was trained on almost 45 terabytes of text data that included almost all of the public world wide web. It identifies and applies the natural patterns in language.

The revolution that has recently occurred in the functioning of AI systems is the direct result of our developing understanding of these cognitive processes. Put simply, the computer neural network has been designed to provide multiple computational units that are programmed to recognise patterns in the data provided. These units are organised in layers with each successive layer providing patterns that summaries the most significant parts of the input data passing this information on to the next layer. This is referred to as a ‘transformer’, and it provides the core technology in AI systems such as ChatGPT and Bard. It is in this sense, that we can see that these developments in information processing, have been inspired by the advances in cognitive neuroscience, and that they are now providing a laboratory context for the further development of our biological understanding of how our brains actually work.

Researcher has recently identified the role of astrocytes, non-neuronal cells that, along with neurons, may function biologically in just the same way as these computational transformers. As Dmitry Krotov, a research staff member at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab has put it: “This is neuroscience for AI and AI for neuroscience,” All of this has huge potential for the further development of AI, and also conceivably, through neural interfacing, in unleashing the full computational potential of the human brain.

We have evolved as innate pattern finders, we seek patterns, identifying meaning in their correspondence with previously experienced patterns, and we continually seek and find patterns in the patterns that we accumulate. The patterns may be images, sounds, any sort of sensory data. We are voracious in our constant searches for meaning. We are even occasionally conscious of the process. Some random sounds reminiscent of a tune, the allure of advertising posters and car registration plates that we cannot help from reading, it is the reason we see the young woman in the gestalt face of the old lady. Our ‘training data’ of accumulated experience is always our individual limitation, and one can currently only speculate about the potential of extending that with the posited direct neuro-interfaced access to the world wide web. While it may sound like science fiction, the first brain computer interfaces (BCIs) are already being used by many people with disabilities to support basic communication and control in their daily lives. Elon Musk’s Neuralink implant company has recently gained approval from the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) to carry out human testing. The current aim is limited to applying the technology to restore vision and mobility, but Musk has also argued that BCI could ultimately help ease concerns about humans being displaced by AI, that BCI offered the possibility of developing ‘superhuman intelligence’, and even the ultimate potential of ‘symbiosis with artificial intelligence’.

Meanwhile, the pace of technological progress of Generative AI is astonishingly, according to Kosinki (2023), for example, a theory of mind (TOM), the ability to identify the individual thinking of another human, may have already spontaneously emerged in the most recent large language model applied in ChatGPT which it is said can already function in these terms at the same level as a seven-year old.

The Land of Me: Unfinished Business

I served as founding Research Director for the Land of Me plc from February 2009 until its dissolution in February 2018. The innovative pedagogic design that I created at that time for The Land of Me remains the state of the art having drawn upon the very latest established understandings of young children’s cognitive and affective development, and the most effective roles that may be played by adults in supporting them. Since then, my work on schematic play carried out within and beyond my development of the SchemaPlay Community Interest Company has continued, and I am currently seeking a new opportunity to apply the insights that I have gained into the development of a new early childhood technology incorporating artificial intelligent (AI) systems in support of holistic and schematic play.

References

Adobe Land of Me Case Study

Made in Me Press Release

Siraj-Blatchford, J., and Brock, L. (2016) Early Childhood Digital Play and the Zone of Proximal_Developmental Flow (ZPDF) in the Proceedings I Congreso Internacional de Innovacion Y Tecnologia Educativa en Educacion Infantil, Seville, April

Siraj-Blatchford, J. (Ed.) (2004) Developing New Technologies for Young Children, (Ed.) Trentham_Books Espanol

Siraj-Blatchford, J., and Whitebread, D. (2003) Supporting Information and Communications Technology in the Early Years, Open University Press

Part Two

“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” (Vygotsky, 1967, 12)

While Piaget distinguished between a figurative schema and an operative scheme, Vygotsky understood the same distinction as a difference between object and meaning. He argued that, with object substitutions in play, the child learns to detach the meaning from the object e.g. the; “…child who stamps on the ground and imagines herself riding a horse has thereby inverted the action/meaning relation to meaning/action”. (Vygotsky, 1978, p100)

For Vygotsky, the ‘operations of meanings’ that constitute higher mental functions first emerge in object substitution play. As Bodrova and Leong (2015) put it:

“…the very emergence of the internal actions signals the beginning of a child’s transition from earlier forms of thought processes – sensory motor and visual representational [rote] – to more advanced symbolic thought. At first more stimulus bound, pre-schoolers gradually learn to transcend ostensive reality. (374)”

Vygotsky doesn’t suggest here that the object substitution is symbolic thinking but rather that the play supports the child in mastering the imaginative prerequisites of symbolic thinking. If we consider the activity view of Inner Speech then this may, or it may not, be conscious (Martínez-Manrique and Vicente, 2015).

Vygotsky suggested symbolic play liberated thought and meaning from concrete objects.

He described how a child’s ACTIONS in response to an object

Become

ACTIONS in response to an IDEA

And it is then possible for Actions to become Thought.

As Lakoff and johnson identified, this process is reflected in the everyday expressions that we use:

We: Fall in Love…. or Fall out with each other…

Sit on the fence… Reach for the Stars…

Jump for Joy… Take a leap of faith…

Tread on thin ice… Dig ourselves in a hole… Keep our chin up…

Throw ideas around

“ An operation is an action that can be internalized; that is, it can be carried out in thought as well as materially” (Piaget, 1970, p21)

Bodrova, E., and Leong, D. (2015) Vygotskian and Post-Vygotskian Views on Children’s Play, Am e r i c a n j o u r n a l o f p l a y, s p r i n g.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press

Martínez-Manrique F., Vicente A. (2015) The activity view of inner speech , Frontiers in Psychology , Vol 6 p232

Vygotsky, L. S. (1967) Imagination and creativity in childhood (Voabraszeniye i tvorchestvo v destkom vosraste) Moscow: Prosvescheniye. (First published 1930)

…no old bald elephants?

It seems reasonable to assume that Wooly Mammoths will have been wooly to retain their heat during the last Ice Age. But it turns out that the hair of modern elephants has the opposite effect to that of their ancestors; it helps them lose heat…

Biologists recognise that every organism has characteristics that are the product of its genetic structure and environmental conditions. Characteristics that alter according to environmental influences are referred to as phenotypically plastic and many popular accounts of evolution suggest that these environmentally induced traits are at times genetically assimilated through selection to become fixed in the development of novel traits and species (Price et al., 2003; de Jong, 2005). The term genetic accommodation is applied to describe the process whereby a novel phenotype, that is generated through mutation or environmental influence becomes ‘canalised’ to a point at which plasticity disappears (West-Eberhard, 2003). At that point it has become fully genetically assimilated. In an extended discussion of the causes and consequences of genetic assimilation Ehrenreich and Pfennig (2015) provide the following Figure:

Piaget understood cognitive adaptation in just the same way with Assimilation associated with the increased canelisation (or the ‘hard wiring’) of schematic knowledge. Elenor Gibson (1988) wrote in a similar way about this in the context of the commonly observed ‘transporting scheme‘ that is often applied by young children in their play:

Theories of the evolution of bipedal locomotion in man have sometimes proposed that the advantage of being able to carry food, young, materials for shelter, tools, etc greatly favored the emergence of walking on two legs . Observing the joy of a novice walker in carrying small objects around, often handing them to someone and then retrieving them to transport again, the possibility does not seem fanciful” (p33)

“Carrying is especially interesting to the developmental psychologist who wishes to relate detection of new affordances to developing cognition because it suggests a spiralling process, beginning with perception of the simplest affordances, such as separability and contactability, then moving on to chewability and graspability, then to reachability, to hideability, and eventually to all the refinements of transportability. With each new coil of the spiral, new properties of surfaces, objects, and events are perceived as consequences of exploratory activity, building an ever richer cognitive world. Detecting new affordances provides the means of differentiating the properties of things”. (p34)

Following the work of Athey and Bruce many early childhood eucators are familiar with this ‘scheme’ of transporting. Piaget (1971) is very clear in his elaboration of the processes that are involved; a phenomenon, e.g. ‘containment’ is only meaningful to the child when they have assimilated it to their motor activity and once assimilated, they ‘accommodate’ those schemata of assimilation to the details of external facts’ – in Gibsonian terms, he is describing how the object of their attention gains those affordances:

“ Then, assimilation becomes more and more closely combined with accommodation, the first of these is reduced to deductive activity itself, the second to experimentation, and the union of these two becomes that indissociable relation between deduction and experience that is the characteristic of reason” (p158)

The idea of a neural pathway has become very popular and I find it helpful, even if only as a metaphor for ‘cognitive cannalisation’. We can imagine habits of thought, or complex motor operations being stored away in our minds like pathways in a forest – the more we use them the stronger they get…the bio chemistry would appear to support the idea as well – It seems like the neuro transmitters – dopamine especially – may energise the signal so that it does something like cutting a deeper pathway or accelerating connectivity….perhaps serotonin has the opposite effect. They therefore associate our actions and perceptions with our moods and emotional expression.

Athey, C. (1990) Extending Thought in Young Children, London: Paul Chapman

Bruce, T. (2011) Early Childhood Education, Oxon: Hodder

Gibson E. (1988) Exploratory Behavior In The Development Of Perceiving, Acting, And The Acquiring of Knowledge, Ann. Rev. Psychol. 1988. 39:1-41

Piaget, J. (1971) The Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child, Penguin Books

Cognitive Overload in the EYFS

Iridophores: Emotional Expressions, Signals or Subterfuge?

There are scientists that argue Chamelions evolved with the ability of changing their colour for a variety of different reasons. I don’t know why they should imagine a trait would have only one particular evolutionary advantage. But mostly I wonder at the remarkable biological sophistication that Chameleons demonstrate. Apparently these distant counsin’s of ours have skin cells where the pigmentation and nanocrystals are pulled together or apart to reflect different light frequencies. A relaxed Chameleon is green and blue, but when it becomes excited it reflects red, orange and yellow. As Darwin recognised in his second masterpiece; The Expression of the Emotions in Man and [other] Animals, every Chameleon’s motivations will be as complex as our own even if we share many of their other physical expressions. We have inherited some quite distinct expressions of our own, the fact that we uncover our teeth in rage, that the hair on our necks stands up when we are in fear, and that we sometimes blush would all seem remarkable to a Chameleon. But none of these can really compete with this remarkable ability to change colour… If ever evidence is required to reject the idea that humanity represents a peak of evolutionary progress then surely here it is.

The Elephant in the Room

Only Connect

The prose and the passion…as Forster put it – lets not live in fragments.

Author: JohnSB