Based on the study of seventy-four middle school children of mostly Filipino and part Hawaiian heritages, this article explores the relationships of children's thinking styles, play preferences, and school performance. Using the Group Embedded Figures Test, the Articulation of the Body Scale, and written responses to three questions, the authors…

Dada, an art movement that became well known in the late 1910s and early 1920s, challenged traditional notions of art and aesthetics. Dada artists, for example, tossed colored scraps of paper into the air to compose chance-based collages, performed sound poems devoid of semantic value, and modeled a headpiece fashioned of sardine cans. To most art…

Play helps children learn language, the authors claim, and they review the evidence for it. They suggest that play benefits children's language development because it incorporates many of the socially interactive and cognitive elements known to enhance language skills. Although much of this evidence proves correlational, they point to a…

In this article, the author outlines Plato's notions of play in ancient Greek culture and shows how the philosopher's views on play can be best appreciated against the background of shifting meanings and evaluations of play in classical Greece. Play--in various forms such as word play, ritual, and music--proved central to the development…

Why do people enjoy jigsaw puzzles, which--challenging and time-consuming as they are--might be considered more like work than play? The author investigates the motivations, preferences, and satisfactions of individuals working on jigsaw puzzles, and she explores how these elements of play relate to the procedures and strategies puzzlers use to…

The authors contend that many cognitive abilities and affective processes important in creativity also occur in pretend play and that pretend play in childhood affects the development of creativity in adulthood. They discuss a variety of theories and observations that attempt to explain the importance of pretend play to creativity. They argue that…

This article explores the role of play in human interaction with computers in the context of computer programming. The author considers many facets of programming including the literary practice of coding, the abstract design of programs, and more mundane activities such as testing, debugging, and hacking. She discusses how these incorporate the…

Many researchers have long assumed imaginative play critical to the healthy cognitive, social, and emotional development of children, which has important implications for early-education policy and practice. But, the authors find, a careful review of the existing literature highlights a need for a better theory to clarify the nature of the…

Many in the field of early literacy development and learning believe strongly that play and literacy share common ground, but they have found the idea difficult to prove. While some primary research indicates a positive relationship, the impact of play seems to occur at different levels of development, which complicates how researchers view its…

The authors consider the analysis of the literature on play research by Lillard and others in the January 2013 "Psychological Bulletin," an analysis that questioned the prevailing assumption of a causal relationship between play and child development, especially in the areas of creativity, reasoning, executive function, and regulation of…

Gender segregation in early-childhood social play is a pervasive pattern in North America, and child-development scholars have suggested it is a human universal. But very few researchers have looked at gender segregation in small-scale societies, particularly those of hunter-gatherers, whom the authors here call foragers. The authors present their…

An article by Angeline S. Lillard and others published in the January 2013 issue of "Psychological Bulletin" about the impact of pretend play on child development raised a number of issues about play studies and child psychology. The article claimed that, contrary to current theories on the subject, the evidence of many studies does not…

The authors discuss the association between make-believe play and the development of executive-function (EF) skills in young children. Some forty years ago, Lev S. Vygotsky first proposed that make-believe fosters the development of symbolic thought and self-regulation. Since then, a small body of research has produced evidence of an association…

In an article in the January 2013 "Psychological Review," Lillard, Lemer, Hopkins, Dore, Smith, and Palmquist set out to critique the customary claim that pretend play contributes to healthy child development. Following Peter Smith, they distinguished three possibilities for the impact of pretend play. Pretend play, they proposed, might…

An article by Angeline S. Lillard and others in the January 2013 issue of "Psychological Bulletin" comprehensively reviewed and criticized the existing body of research on pretend play and children's development. Nicolopoulou and Ilgaz respond specifically to the article's critical review of research on play and narrative…