Play and Executive Functioning Flashcards
Children’s free play dropped by a _______ between 1981 and 1997.
Children’s free play dropped by a quarter between 1981 and 1997.
50% of play up to 2 years of age is what kind of play?
Sensorimotor play – learning and repeating action sequences
50% of play of 4-6 year-olds is what kind of play?
Constructive play –making stuff
Games with rules grow dramatically from what age?
4-7
“Children cannot think mathematically, logically and scientifically”. This fits which stage of development?
Piaget’s preoperational child.
Despite foundations of scientific thinking being present, children tend not to…
Control for variables. Domain-specific knowledge is critical for this.
Why might there be a gap between high- and low-SES in maths skills, despite identical amounts of mathematical play?
Low-SES kids have less opportunity to reflect on play and make these concepts explicit, as they are exposed to much less decontextualised language –i.e. not about what’s immediately in front of you.
So some environments are better at translating foundations of maths into formal reasoning abilities.
What are the three key resources for executive functioning?
- Working memory –e.g. remember what it is you should be doing
- Inhibitory control - e.g. being able to take turns
- Mental flexibility – e.g. adapt to new conditions
Executive functioning is critical for… 5 things
- Devising a plan and sticking to it
- Monitoring what you are doing or learning
- Meta-cognitive evaluation
- Emotion regulation
- Social appropriateness
Poor performance on the marshmallow test is predictive of which 3 lifelong outcomes?
- Worse performance in school, worse liked among peers
- Likelihood of being a drug addict, not completing high school.
- Disorders of impulsivity
What is an alternate explanation for the lure of visual features over matching relations? 2 reasons.
Kids cannot inhibit most obvious response.
And finding commonalities in the relations requires WM (Relational Complexity Theory)
What is Halford’s Relational Complexity Theory?
The theory that it is not the number of items that draws on WM, but the relationship between them. A large number of separate items can be processed serially, but relations among them force you to process them simultaneously.
What can reduce WM load in problem solving?
High quality knowledge. Concepts/actions can be chunked together.
Piaget showed that pre-operational kids cannot solve A:B:: C:D analogies. But later researchers showed they CAN solve what? And why?
The same analogies with objects they know (e.g. slice of bread, slice of lemon).
This requires less working memory, as these relationships can be retrieved from long-term memory.
Why might low-SES kids have poorer executive functioning?
They are exposed to more stress, which specifically impairs the pre-frontal cortex. And they are given less stimulation, which also prevents PFC from developing.
