Kolb – changes in play

The second thing is if you look at play, it shows an age related change. So as animals grow older, the nature of their play changes. The rules begin to shift somewhat, which makes some sense. If you look at little children, infants playing versus five year olds playing versus 12 year olds playing, they don’t all play the same, and that’s true in other animals as well; there are changes in play behaviour. Now, one question we’ve asked is what if you manipulate the amount of play animals are allowed to engage in. So what we can do is we can say we’ll take an animal when they’re weaned and we’ll place them with an adult animal. Adult rodents don’t play with the offspring; they interact with the offspring, they’ll tolerate the play for a few seconds then they don’t want to do it. It’s really one sided because it’s rough and tumble play and you couldn’t have an adult male rat playing with an animal that’s a fraction of his size without hurting the animal probably. So we’ve got the situation where we take away the infants, or the juveniles now, place them with an adult, or several adults, so now we’ve manipulated the number of animals that are there. Or we can have them live with one sibling, or several siblings, so controlled two things here; we’ve manipulated two things: the amount of social interaction which will vary with the number of animals you’re living with, and the amount of play. The more animals there are to play with, the more play you’re going to engage in, which makes sense.