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. 2018 May 31:9:635.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00635. eCollection 2018.

The Efficiency of Infants' Exploratory Play Is Related to Longer-Term Cognitive Development

Paul Muentener  1 , Elise Herrig  2 , Laura Schulz  2
Affiliations

The Efficiency of Infants' Exploratory Play Is Related to Longer-Term Cognitive Development

Paul Muentener et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

In this longitudinal study we examined the stability of exploratory play in infancy and its relation to cognitive development in early childhood. We assessed infants' (N = 130, mean age at enrollment = 12.02 months, SD = 3.5 months; range: 5-19 months) exploratory play four times over 9 months. Exploratory play was indexed by infants' attention to novelty, inductive generalizations, efficiency of exploration, face preferences, and imitative learning. We assessed cognitive development at the fourth visit for the full sample, and again at age three for a subset of the sample (n = 38). The only measure that was stable over infancy was the efficiency of exploration. Additionally, infants' efficiency score predicted vocabulary size and distinguished at-risk infants recruited from early intervention sites from those not at risk. Follow-up analyses at age three provided additional evidence for the importance of the efficiency measure: more efficient exploration was correlated with higher IQ scores. These results suggest that the efficiency of infants' exploratory play can be informative about longer-term cognitive development.

Keywords: IQ; cognitive development; exploratory play; infancy; longitudinal design.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Description of the overall study design.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Sample stimuli images. All four Efficiency stimuli are shown below. Sample stimuli from the remaining tasks are shown below; see Table 1 for a description of the full stimulus set.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Visual depiction of coding procedure. Coders coded no more than one task within a visit and no more than one visit for a given task. For example, if a coder coded the Visit 1 Attention to Novelty task for a participant, then that coder did not code any other Visit 1 task or the Attention to Novelty task on any other visit for that participant.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Relation between the Efficiency of exploration scores in infancy and IQ at age three.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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