So the question we can ask is do kids have to play with other children or can they just play with puzzles? They\u2019re both kinds of problem solving, and I think they\u2019re both important kinds of problem solving. The studies of Tom Boyce suggest that the interaction of children and the way they engage in play-related behaviours is very important. That playing with puzzles or doing word games or whatever may be important for certain kinds of activities, but children set up social hierarchies when they play with one another, and these hierarchies are important in children learning how to engage with one another. If you think about the most complicated behaviour that we have, it\u2019s social interaction because, just give you a simple example, if I\u2019m around my mother, if I\u2019m a child for example, I\u2019m around my mother or I\u2019m around my friends, I do not behave the same way. If I\u2019m around my mother versus some other adult I don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t behave the same way. If I\u2019m around my conspecifics, my peer group, and it\u2019s made up of six individuals, and then another time it\u2019s made up of another six individuals but they might have an overlap of two, my behaviour might be very different in the two situations. Just watch teenage girls, I mean the way they interact with one another with one group of girls versus another is completely different depending on their experiences earlier. Males aren\u2019t so affected by those early interactions. So I think that those actual one to one interactions rather than one to puzzle interactions are really important for getting the frontal lobe up to speed in terms of how you keep track of all of this contextual information that you\u2019re going to need as an adult in a complicated world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Does that mean that puzzles aren\u2019t important? No, it doesn\u2019t mean that at all. It just means that the social interaction is a really complicated form of problem solving. You need to do it to learn it; you can\u2019t be told how to do it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So the question we can ask is do kids have to play with other children or can they just play with puzzles? They\u2019re both kinds of problem solving, and I think they\u2019re both important kinds of problem solving. The studies of Tom Boyce suggest that the interaction of children and the way they engage in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1547","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1548,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1547\/revisions\/1548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}