Is play "rational?" toys and ambiguous causal structure

Thu, 01/03/2008 - 03:03 - NLN

Play is more often simply observed than studied scientifically -- play behaviors occur unpredictably and, when they do occur, are highly chaotic, making it very difficult to study them in the laboratory. Despite these challenges, new work is beginning to make play accessible from a rigorous scientific framework.

For example, a recent article by Schulz & Bonawitz takes Piaget's notion of play as a mechanism for understanding causal relationships and recasts it into a testable prediction: children should be more likely to play with an object about which they have incomplete or confounded evidence.

Read full story in Developing Intelligence