12. What Game Are We Playing? Narrative Work that Supports Gamblers

Micaela Castiglioni and Carola Girotti place the official narrative and counter-narrative of gambling in the broader context of modern-day society and adult play before describing two Italian initiatives to support gamblers to shed their addiction. One of these, the self-help Gamblers Anonymous group, uses narrative approaches to help members publicly tell and re-frame their own life stories in order to see themselves differently and therefore to resist a return to addiction.

Preschool-aged children jointly consider others’ emotional expressions and prior knowledge to decide when to explore

Emotional expressions are abundant in children’s lives. What role do these expressions play in children’s learning? Here we ask whether preschool-aged children use others’ emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (3.0-4.9 years; N=112) learned about one salient causal function of a novel toy, and then saw an adult play with the toy. Children explored the toy more when the adult expressed surprise than when she expressed happiness (Experiment 1), but only when the adult already knew about the toy's salient function (Experiment 2). These results suggest that children selectively interpret others’ surprise as “vicarious prediction error” based on others’ knowledge, and use it to guide their own exploration and discovery.

Adult Play

Welcome to the Adult Play Special Issue. In this introduction, we (the editors) explain the origin of the collection and our unique take on what adult play means as a term. Rather than be specifically about sexual play, the term adult is taken here to reference the age of players. The article included how adults play, what they play with, and when they play. This of course includes, but is not limited to, play of a sexual nature. We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed editing it.

Playful Information Literacy: Play and Information Literacy in Higher Education

It is often difficult to address higher level information literacy skills in Higher Education. This paper argues if we see information literacy as contextual rather than an absolute list of competencies, then play can give us a route to developing those higher level skills.It takes a social constructivist approach in defining information literacy, before going on to define play and games as belonging on a wide spectrum between completely free or open play and highly structured games.Using examples from the literature, the paper builds the argument that play is one answer towards meeting the need to develop high level information literacy in students, even though there is limited empirical research into adult play and information literacy development.

Towards a neuroscientific understanding of play: A neuropsychological coding framework for analysing infant-adult play patterns

ABSTRACTDuring early life, play is a ubiquitous activity, and an individual’s propensity for play is positively related to cognitive development and emotional well-being. Play behaviour is diverse and multi-faceted. A challenge for current research is to converge on a common definition and measurement system for play ‒ whether examined at a behavioural, cognitive or neurological level. Combining these different approaches in a multi-level analysis could yield significant advances in understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms of play, and provide the basis for developing biologically-grounded play models. However, there is currently no integrated framework for conducting a multi-level analysis of play that spans brain, cognition and behaviour. The proposed neuropsychological coding framework uses grounded and observable behaviours along three neuropsychological dimensions (sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional), to compute inferences about playful behaviour and related social interactional states. Here, we illustrate the sensitivity and utility of the proposed coding framework using two contrasting dyadic corpora (N=5) of mother-infant object-oriented interactions during experimental conditions that were either conducive (Condition 1) or non-conducive (Condition 2) to the emergence of playful behaviour. We find that the framework accurately identifies the modal form of social interaction as being either playful (Condition 1) or non-playful (Condition 2), and further provides useful insights about differences in the quality of social interaction and temporal synchronicity within the dyad. In conclusion, here, we present a novel neuropsychological framework for analysing the continuous time-evolution of adult-infant play patterns, underpinned by biologically informed state coding along sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions. We expect that the proposed framework will have wide utility amongst researchers wishing to employ an integrated, multi-level approach to the study of play, and lead towards a greater understanding of the neuroscientific basis of play and may yield insights into a new biologically-grounded taxonomy of play interactions.