Muentener Paul, Herrig Elise, Schulz Laura
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, United States.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Medford, MA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2018 May 31;9:635. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00635. eCollection 2018.
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' ( = 130, mean age at enrollment = 12.02 months, = 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 ( = 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.
在这项纵向研究中，我们考察了婴儿期探索性玩耍的稳定性及其与幼儿期认知发展的关系。我们在9个月内对婴儿（ = 130名，入组时平均年龄 = 12.02个月， = 3.5个月；范围：5 - 19个月）的探索性玩耍进行了四次评估。探索性玩耍通过婴儿对新奇事物的关注、归纳概括、探索效率、面部偏好和模仿学习来衡量。我们在第四次访视时对整个样本进行了认知发展评估，并在三岁时对部分样本（ = 38名）再次进行了评估。在婴儿期唯一稳定的指标是探索效率。此外，婴儿的效率得分可预测词汇量大小，并能区分从早期干预机构招募的高危婴儿和非高危婴儿。三岁时的随访分析为效率指标的重要性提供了更多证据：探索效率越高，智商得分越高。这些结果表明，婴儿探索性玩耍的效率可以为长期认知发展提供信息。
