Set Of Toys Research Articles

Disarming the Toy Store and Reloading the Shopping Cart: Resistance to Violent Consumer Culture

This article examines the trajectory of North American‐based peace groups that mobilized to critique a set of nationalistic symbols, including military and war‐related toys and games and their commodification for children. Beginning in the immediate post–World War I period and continuing through the twentieth century, a constellation of peace organizations developed advocacy campaigns aimed at changing consumers’ behavior. Activists tailored their efforts to fit their shorter and long‐term goals, access to resources, and immediate historical contexts. Over time, peace groups’ protests against violent toys and games gained some traction, although the multibillion dollar toy and game industries in the United States continued to market violent entertainment geared toward children. By the turn of the twenty‐first century, antiviolence activists were effectively broadening their appeal to North American consumers by linking their concerns to public health campaigns focused on children's safety.

Object use affects motor planning in infant prehension

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors underlying the ability to plan object-oriented grasping movements in the first two years of life. In particular, we were interested in evaluating the relationship between manual motor planning, object use and infant-parent interaction. In order to achieve this aim, grasping behaviors of nineteen healthy infants, aged nine to 25months, were examined during naturalistic play sessions with a standard set of toys. Our main finding was that, regardless of age, infants perform a better manual planning when they use an object in a functional rather than non-functional way, suggesting that the planning of an action also depends on knowing the functional properties of an object. In addition, we found that the ability to use objects in a functional way was strongly affected by infant-parent interaction. Thus, level of object use and environmental role must be taken into account in order to understand the development of manual motor planning.

Playing with technology: Mother–toddler interaction scores lower during play with electronic toys

To investigate play with electronic toys (battery-operated or digital), 25 mother–toddler (16–24months old) dyads were videotaped in their homes playing with sets of age-appropriate electronic and non-electronic toys for approximately 10min each. Parent–child interactions were coded from recorded segments of both of the play conditions using the PICCOLO checklist. Mean scores for each play session were compared and the result showed significantly lower scores in the electronic toy condition for three of the four domains of the PICCOLO. Family demographic and play pattern data were also collected, via self-report questionnaire. These data indicated that the play experiences of toddlers were compromised by the lower quality of parent–child interaction during joint play with electronic toys. The potential impact on early child development and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Effectiveness of adaptive pretend play on affective expression and imagination of children with cerebral palsy

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) have difficulty participating in role-pretending activities. The concept of adaptive play makes play accessible by modifying play materials for different needs or treatment goals for children with CP. This study examines the affective expressions and imagination in children with CP as a function of ordinary versus adaptive pretend play. The Affect in Play Scale-Brief Rating measured the affective expression and imagination for 29 children with CP and 29 typically developing children (mean age=7.34 years). Two groups of children were observed while playing with a standard set of ordinary toys for ten times and with a standard procedure of adaptive pretend play for ten times. The results show significantly different affective expressions and imagination between the two groups. Typically developing children displayed much more affective expression and imagination. However, a more positive influence of affective expression and imagination occurred in children with CP than in typically developing children. In repeated measures analysis, the frequency of positive affective expression and imagination of children with CP was higher when pretending with adaptive toys. Adaptive pretend play can promote more role-pretending behaviors and a sense of environmental control during the manipulating process for children with CP.

Mathematics, Models, and Magz, Part I: Patterns in Pascal's Triangle and Tetrahedron

SummaryThis paper describes how the authors used a set of magnetic toys to discover analogues in 3 dimensions of well known theorems about binomial coefficients. In particular, they looked at the Star of David theorem involving the six nearest neighbors to a binomial coefficient . If one labels the vertices of the bounding hexagon with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, consecutively (in either direction), then the product of the coefficients with even labels is the same as the product as the coefficients with odd labels. Furthermore the two figures formed by connecting the odd and even vertices are both equilateral triangles arranged so that a rotation of ±60° exchanges the triangles. There is a generalized Star of David theorem concerning a semi-regular hexagon with similar results. The paper describes analogous results for trinomial coefficients involving, sometimes but not always, tetrahedra instead of triangles.

Come Play With Me

Come Play With Me

User as Designer: A Design Model of User Creativity Platforms

In recent years, with the rising of the open innovation notion, creativity orientation has become a focus in new product development. Products that facilitate user's creativity can be viewed as a creativity platform. The intangible software industry has developed over the years to meet users' creativity, while research and relevant discourses on physical products are still lacking. This study proposes a design model of platforms to satisfy user creativity for physical products, called User Creativity Platforms UCPs. The model includes eight steps: 1 explore user's creativity needs, 2 classify functionality of the product, 3 develop primary and secondary components, 4 design a creativity-friendly interface, 5 prototype components, 6 examine UCP product features, 7 evaluate user's design experience, and 8 assess the potential creativity of the user's outcomes. According to the proposed model, a set of assembly toys with UCP features was developed. Using kindergarten children as subjects and employing professional designers and preschool teachers as evaluators, the developed UCP product not only satisfied users' creativity needs but also distinguished design outcomes of children from those with existing toys in the same category. The proposed model is feasible and effective and can expand the level of design from pure product design to a creativity platform and experience design, thus creating new design value, assisting industries in developing platform products, and meeting the users' needs for self-accomplishment. This article introduces the concept of a user creativity platform and proposes a feasible and effective design model for enterprises and designers to raise the values of the function and creativity of products. The platform can develop products that exceed other products of the same category and can allow users to enjoy the fun of designing on their own.

One-to-One Play Promotes Numerical Equivalence Concepts

Young children spontaneously engage in a variety of one-to-one correspondence activities during play. The present study tested whether one of these activities—pairing objects with containers—supported the development of numerical equivalence judgments. Three-year-olds were given sets of toys to take home. In one condition, the toys were accompanied by a container that facilitated one-to-one matching (e.g., wiffle balls and a muffin tin). In the other condition, the same toys were accompanied by a numerically equivalent set of loose objects (e.g., wiffle balls and plastic frogs). At test, children who had played with the containers showed significant improvement on a challenging number-matching task (i.e., cross mapping). In contrast, children who had played with the loose sets of objects continued to perform at chance.

Out of the mouths of babes: vocal production in infant siblings of children with ASD.

Younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are at higher risk for acquiring these disorders than the general population. Language development is usually delayed in children with ASD. The present study examines the development of pre-speech vocal behavior in infants at risk for ASD due to the presence of an older sibling with the disorder. Infants at high risk (HR) for ASD and those at low risk, without a diagnosed sibling (LR), were seen at 6, 9, and 12 months as part of a larger prospective study of risk for ASD in infant siblings. Standard clinical assessments were administered, and vocalization samples were collected during play with mother and a standard set of toys. Infant vocal behavior was recorded and analyzed for consonant inventory, presence of canonical syllables, and of non-speech vocalizations, in a cross-sectional design. Children were seen again at 24 months for provisional diagnosis. Differences were seen between risk groups for certain vocal behaviors. Differences in vocal production in the first year of life were associated with outcomes in terms of autistic symptomotology in the second year. Early vocal behavior is a sensitive indicator of heightened risk for autistic symptoms in infants with a family history of ASD.

Developmental Trajectories for Mother-Infant Coregulation in the Second Year of Life.

Ten dyads were observed biweekly from 10 to 24 months of infant age while playing together at home with a set of toys. The aim was to examine whether mother-infant coregulation changes over the second year of the infant's life and whether there are individual differences in that process. Normative trends as well as variability between and within dyads were tested using a multilevel modeling technique. We found that unilateral coregulation, in which only the mother was actively involved in play, largely prevailed at the beginning of the year and then decreased linearly, while symmetrical patterns, implying that the infant was also involved, were for the most part absent at the beginning but then increased rapidly, overtaking unilateral from the middle of the year on and becoming predominant by the end. In particular, symmetrical episodes of shared affect and shared action increased first and then decreased, being replaced by shared language. Variability in data was significant between the dyads, with some dyads advancing toward symmetrical coregulation at an earlier age and more rapidly than the others. It was also significant within the dyads, as the increase in symmetrical coregulation unfolded in a quite irregular manner across the sessions, unlike the decrease in unilateral. Results are discussed with reference to a view of joint attention development as a gradual and complex process.

Constraints on the Timing of Infant Cognitive Change: Domain-Specific or Domain-General?

Most studies of infant cognition focus on group data from single domains. Yet, without the multidomain testing of the same infants longitudinally, such data cannot be used to evaluate whether the timing of cognitive change occurs in a domain-general or a domain-specific way. We present the results of a longitudinal study pooling data from three European laboratories set up identically. Over 100 healthy, monolingual infants each underwent multi-domain testing at 6 and again at 10 months in six experimental tasks (speech processing, face processing, and action/event processing), as well as a videotaped 3-minute recording of mother/infant dyads in a play session with an identical set of toys. Previous research examined the effects of maternal sensitivity only on general intelligence measures, but our approach is novel in that it assessed dyadic effects on specific cognitive domains, attempting to pinpoint in finer detail the effects of mother-infant dyadic interaction on the timing of cognitive change. Our findings highlight the importance of a multi-domain approach, in that unlike the assumptions drawn from cross-sectional data, our longitudinal study yielded different developmental timing across domains within the same infants. Our results also highlight a crucial difference: at the group level 6- and 10-month-olds display the expected effects found in previous research, but when re-analysed according to mother-child interaction ratings, the quality of dyadic interaction style turned out to subtly foster or delay development in domainspecific and age-specific ways, contributing to the range of individual differences in timing that we observe in cognitive development over the first year of life.

Stuffed toys and speech perception

Previous research has shown that speech perception can be influenced by a speaker's social characteristics, including the expected dialect area of the speaker (Niedzielski, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18: 62–85, 1999; Hay et al. The Linguistic Review 23: 351–379, 2006a). This article reports on an experiment designed to test to degree to which exposure to the concept of a region can also influence perception. In order to invoke the concept, we exposed participants, who were all speakers of New Zealand English, to either stuffed toy kangaroos and koalas (associated with Australia) or stuffed toy kiwis (associated with New Zealand). Participants then completed a perception task in which they matched natural vowels produced by a male New Zealander to vowels from a synthesized continuum which ranged from raised and fronted Australian-like tokens to lowered and centralized New Zealand-like tokens. Our results indicate that perception of the vowels shifted depending on which set of toys the participants had seen. This supports models of speech perception in which linguistic and nonlinguistic information are intricately entwined.

Isaac de Caus invenit

Isaac de Caus invenit

Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (review)

Reviewed by: Falling for Science: Objects in Mind Rachel Maines (bio) Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. Edited by Sherry Turkle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp. xii+318. $24.95. Sherry Turkle’s collection of essays, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, opens with an introduction in which she describes her objectives for the book. “There are many paths into science,” she tells us. “This collection explores one of them, a path in which imagination is sparked by an object” (p. 3) There are two sets of short essays, both about “young people discovering objects that can ‘make a mind’: a puzzle, a toy pony, a broken radio, a set of gears, origami.” The first group of essays, contained in “Part I: MIT Students and Their Objects (1979–2007),” is by Turkle’s students or former students; Part II consists of narratives by “mentors,” whom she describes as “distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers” who relate their experiences with objects as children and young adults. In her “Epilogue: What Inspires?” (pp. 273–83), Turkle suggests that her intended readership is parents and educators, with the goal of increasing the flow of young people into science. “Too often, if we can’t formulate a test, we give up on a method or we give up on a child,” she argues. “The voices in this collection remind us that at these moments we can turn [End Page 502] directly to a child and put our deeper intelligence to work. It can be a moment when we listen, when we learn what inspires, a moment of discovery for a parent or a teacher” (p. 274). The essays are for the most part appealing and entertaining to read, but it is unclear whether they support Turkle’s hypothesis regarding objects, or her agenda for using them to draw children into science. As for the hypothesis, the authors of these brief narratives are or were either students at MIT or established scientists. They are therefore not only a self-selected sample of people already attracted to science, but authors who, with ingenuous and charming hindsight bias, now seek to explain the origins in the past of their love for science in the present. Most of us have such “creation myths” for our professional choices, but we have no way of knowing how influential the remembered episodes actually were, or even if our—and our parents’— memories of them are genuine. Turkle makes good use of the existing literature, especially works on the role of creative play in early education, such as the essays edited by John Brockman, Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist (2004), Jean Piaget’s works, including The Child’s Conception of the World (1960), and Friedrich Frobel’s The Education of Man (2005), in which the author describes “Frobel’s Gifts,” a set of creative toys for children. Objects in Mind’s Part II, “Mentors and Their Objects” (pp. 216–71), the narratives by established scientists, draws heavily on published autobiographical works, including Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1981), Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten: A Chemical Boyhood (2001), and Norbert Weiner’s Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964). The self-selection bias mentioned earlier raises issues not addressed in Falling for Science, particularly the number of adults who could relate “objects-to-think-with” anecdotes from their childhoods, different in no obvious way from those in Turkle’s collection who did not become scientists. This reviewer, for example, spent hours as a child building structures and designs with her grandmother’s multicolored celluloid clothespins and can still describe in detail both the pins and the lidless metal box in which they were stored. But my own “creation myth” as a historian (not a scientist) revolves around falling in love, even before I could read, with the lavishly illustrated Golden History of the World (1955). It certainly seems likely that, as Turkle suggests, children will benefit from “close encounters with rich materials” (p. 36), including books, but that these encounters will increase the proportion of them who choose to become scientists is by no means clear. Object play may be necessary, but the evidence suggests that...

Understanding of Others' Intentions by Young Children with Williams Syndrome

Understanding of Others' Intentions by Young Children with Williams Syndrome

ERP correlates of noun and verb processing in preschool-age children

Indices of discrimination between words of different syntactic classes were examined in a group of 22 preschool-age children utilizing event-related potential (ERP) procedures. Video taped scenes depicted an actor performing actions with a set of toys. ERPs were recorded to spoken nouns or verbs that either matched or failed to match the action name or object name in the video scene. ERPs were analyzed using peak amplitude-ANOVA procedures and principal components analysis-ANOVA. Results indicated good convergence across analysis approaches. More specifically, P100 and N220 varied bilaterally over frontal electrode sites and discriminated between different syntactic classes for both match and mismatch situations. Based on comparisons with adult data from previous work [Molfese, D.L., Burger-Judisch, L., Gill, L.A., Golinkoff, R.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., 1996. Electrophysiological correlates of noun-verb processing in adults. Brain and Language 54 388–413], it is suggested that the pattern of brain involvement underlying syntactic class discriminations undergo developmental changes between the preschool years and adulthood.

Chimpanzees use self-distraction to cope with impulsivity

It is unknown whether animals, like humans, can employ behavioural strategies to cope with impulsivity. To examine this question, we tested whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) would use self-distraction as a coping strategy in a situation in which they had to continually inhibit responses to accumulating candies in order to earn a greater amount of those rewards. We tested animals in three conditions in which they were sometimes given a set of toys and were sometimes allowed physical access to the accumulating candies. Chimpanzees allowed the rewards to accumulate longer before responding when they could divert their attention to the toys, and they manipulated the toys more when the candies were physically accessible. Thus, chimpanzees engaged in self-distraction with the toys when such behaviour was most beneficial as a coping mechanism.

Flexible and Context‐Dependent Categorization by Eighteen‐Month‐Olds

One hundred 18-month-olds were tested using sequential touching and following 4 different priming contexts using sets of toys that could be simultaneously categorized at either the basic or global level. An exact expression of the expected mean sequence length for arbitrary categories was derived as a function of the number of touches made, and a finite mixture model analytic method was also used to explore individual variability in categorization. Toddlers could categorize flexibly and spontaneously selected the level of categorization as a function of the prior prime. Perceptual Variability emerged as a predictor of the level at which infants subsequently categorized. The infants were also able to classify objects as members of both basic- and global-level categories simultaneously.

The Impact of Visual Communication on the Intersubjective Development of Early Parent-Child Interaction With 18- to 24-Month-Old Deaf Toddlers

This article presents a study that examined the impact of visual communication on the quality of the early interaction between deaf and hearing mothers and fathers and their deaf children aged between 18 and 24 months. Three communication mode groups of parent-deaf child dyads that differed by the use of signing and visual-tactile communication strategies were involved: (a) hearing parents communicating with their deaf child in an auditory/oral way, (b) hearing parents using total communication, and (c) deaf parents using sign language. Based on Loots and colleagues' intersubjective developmental theory, parent-deaf child interaction was analyzed according to the occurrence of intersubjectivity during free play with a standard set of toys. The data analyses indicated that the use of sign language in a sequential visual way of communication enabled the deaf parents to involve their 18- to 24-month-old deaf infants in symbolic intersubjectivity, whereas hearing parents who hold on to oral-only communication were excluded from involvement in symbolic intersubjectivity with their deaf infants. Hearing parents using total communication were more similar to deaf parents, but they still differed from deaf parents in exchanging and sharing symbolic and linguistic meaning with their deaf child.

Multiple labels for objects in conversations with young children: parents' language and children's developing expectations about word meanings.

Children sometimes seem to expect words to have mutually exclusive meanings in certain contexts of early word learning. In 2 studies, 12- to 24-month-old children and their parents were videotaped as they engaged in conversations while playing with sets of toys (sea creatures, vehicles, doll clothing) in free-play, storytelling, and categorization contexts. In both studies, parents demonstrated a reliable preference to provide just 1 label for a given object. Importantly, parents' violations of this preference were usually accompanied by clarifying (or "bridging") information that either indicated the relation between the 2 labels or suggested that 1 of the labels was appropriate. Further, in some contexts, parents' tendency to use multiple labels and to provide bridging information for multiple labels was correlated with children's productive vocabulary. It is argued that these findings support a socio-pragmatic hypothesis about the origins of children's early beliefs about word meanings.