By Jeff DelViscio, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Abe Sater, Robin Lindsay and Kriston Lewis
Buckets of Blickets: Children and Logic: A game developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley hopes to show how imaginative play in children may influence development of abstract thought.
When it comes to play, humans don't play around.
Podcast: Science Times
Abby Ellin on the increasing numbers of older people turning up in therapy, Carl Zimmer on an effort to see why Spot runs or fetches or ignores you, and David Dobbs on how play contributes to human success.
Alison Gopnik and the Gopnik Lab/University of California, Berkeley
Esther and Benny, both 5, played Blickets with Sophie Bridgers in a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Children, lacking prior biases, excel in the game, based on associations, but adults flunk it.
Other species play, but none play for as much of their lives as humans do, or as imaginatively, or with as much protection from the family circle. Human children are unique in using play to explore hypothetical situations rather than to rehearse actual challenges they'll face later. Kittens may pretend to be cats fighting, but they will not pretend to be children; children, by contrast, will readily pretend to be cats or kittens — and then to be Hannah Montana, followed by Spider-Man saving the day.
And in doing so, they develop some of humanity's most consequential faculties. They learn the art, pleasure and power of hypothesis — of imagining new possibilities. And serious students of play believe that this helps make the species great.
The idea that play contributes to human success goes back at least a century. But in the last 25 years or so, researchers like Elizabeth S. Spelke, Brian Sutton-Smith, Jaak Panksepp and Alison Gopnik have developed this notion more richly and tied it more closely to both neuroscience and human evolution. They see play as essential not just to individual development, but to humanity's unusual ability to inhabit, exploit and change the environment.
Dr. Gopnik, author of "The Scientist in the Crib" and "The Philosophical Baby," and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying the ways that children learn to assess their environment through play. Lately she has focused on the distinction between "exploring" new environments and "exploiting" them. When we're quite young, we are more willing to explore, she finds; adults are more inclined to exploit.
To exploit, one leans heavily on lessons (and often unconscious rules) learned earlier — so-called prior biases. These biases are useful to adults because they save time and reduce error: By going to the restaurant you know is good, instead of the new place across town, you increase the chance that you'll enjoy the evening.
Most adults are slow to set such biases aside; young children fling them away like bad fruit.
Dr. Gopnik shows this brilliantly with a game she invented with the psychologist David Sobel (her student, now a professor at Brown). In the game, which has the fetching name Blickets, players try to figure out what it is that makes an otherwise undistinguished clay figure a blicket. In some scenarios you can win even if you're applying a prior bias. In others you can't.
Last summer I joined Dr. Gopnik behind a wall of one-way glass to watch her lab manager, Sophie Bridgers, play the game with an extremely alert 5-year-old, Esther.
Seated at a child-size table, Esther leaned forward on her elbows to watch as Ms. Bridgers brought out a small bin of clay shapes and told her that some of them were blickets but most were not.
"You cannot tell which ones are blickets by looking at them. But the ones that are blickets have blicketness inside. And luckily," Ms. Bridgers went on, holding up a box with a red plastic top, "I have my machine. Blicketness makes my machine turn on and play music."
It's a ruse, of course. The box responds not to the clay shapes but to a switch under the table controlled by Ms. Bridgers.
Now came the challenge. The game can be played by either of two rules, called "and" and "or." The "or" version is easier: When a blicket is placed atop the machine, it will light the machine up whether placed there by itself or with other pieces. It is either a blicket or it isn't; it doesn't depend on the presence of any other object.
In the "and" trial, however, a blicket reveals its blicketness only if both it and another blicket are placed on the machine; and it will light up the box even if it and the other blicket are accompanied by a non-blicket. It can be harder than it sounds, and this is the game that Esther played.
First, Ms. Bridgers put each of three clay shapes on the box individually — rectangle, then triangle, then a bridge. None activated the machine. Then she put them on the box in three successive combinations.
1. Rectangle and triangle: No response.
2. Rectangle and bridge: Machine lighted up and played a tune!
3. Triangle and bridge: No response.
Ms. Bridgers then picked up each piece in turn and asked Esther whether it was a blicket. I had been indulging my adult (and journalistic) prior bias for recorded observation by filling several pages with notes and diagrams, and I started flipping frantically through my notebook.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 24, 2013
An article on Tuesday about the study of children's play and the role of play in human evolution misstated the surname of the lab manager at the University of California, Berkeley, who played a game called Blickets with young lab participants. She is Sophie Bridgers, not Bridges. The article also misstated the age of two of the participants, twins named Esther and Benny. At the time they were observed for the article, they had recently turned 5; they were not 4. The errors were repeated in an accompanying picture caption.
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