September 13, 2022 • 41 mins
What exactly is "fun" and how does it differ from other concepts related to quality and experience? Robert and Joe explore the question in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our series on fun.
Of course, we all roughly know what fun is. You
(00:24):
know fun when you see it, you know fun when
you're having it, so you got a gut level understanding.
But fun is actually rather difficult to define and to
differentiate from other related concepts like pleasure, happiness, and entertainment.
So we've been trying to to tease out some of
the studies about fun and some observations people can make
about fun and what its unique characteristics are. Now, in
(00:48):
the last episode we talked a bit uh Rob. You
had a section about what particular features make a game fun,
and I thought one of the most interesting things you
brought up there was the suggestion of a natural association
between learning and fun, which is in a way kind
of funny because you can think about very painful attempts
(01:10):
to to make wrote learning quote fun in some way,
you know, adding games in school that are of questionable
fund value sometimes but that could in a way still
be onto something because there may, in fact be um
a major role for fun in the kind of learning
that we do in a non structured way, in a
non school environment, when we're just learning through free exploratory behavior. Yeah. Yeah,
(01:35):
it is fascinating to think about because it made me
think back, certainly on school days and at various age
points and thinking like, well, when did this? When did
it become fun to engage in this quest for learning?
And you know, those are the learning experiences that that
do tend to stand out the most. Yeah, I have
similar experiences. A lot of what I remember most from
(01:56):
school are the things that were the most fun in school. Uh.
And So I wanted to talk about a paper that
I came across that I found pretty interesting. I think, again,
this only addresses one facet of the issue of funds
is it's not going to give you a total view.
But it was a really interesting child psychology paper from
two thousand seven addressing the relationship between toys, fun, and
(02:20):
a child's ability to control natural experiments. So this paper
was by a couple of authors named Laura E. Schultz
and Elizabeth Barreff Bonna Wits. Now for some context, I
was checking out, particularly some of the other research by
Laura Schultz. She actually has a a pretty good TED
talk where she explains sort of the arc of her career.
(02:42):
It's from a few years back, but Schultz is a
professor of cognitive sciences at m I T and a
lot of her research is focused on the question how
do children learn so well? Because children are able to
learn how the world works in a relatively short time,
with relatively limited experiences. I mean, people often phrase this
(03:04):
question about language in particular, I think because language acquisition
is just one of the most amazing things. Yeah, it's
it's astounding, Like the way children acquire language, Like how
do you learn to put together infinitely variable, grammatically functional
sentences just by listening to adults talk for a few years,
(03:24):
Like you don't even have to be taught the rules
of grammar, you know, when you learn grammar in school.
The grammar you're learning there is basically just an analytical
tool or maybe an attempt to kind of regularize or
normalize exactly the way you construct sentences. But you're you're
already able to do so in a functional way, I mean,
(03:45):
where people can understand you. Yeah, the neural plasticity of
children is just absolutely amazing. I know we've we've touched
on it a few times over the over the years,
and yeah, it's it's fascinating to learn about. It's it's
mind blowing to experience in real life and real time
that you sort of lose some of the mystery at
times by being so close to it. But but yeah,
(04:06):
like that they have to acquire so much data in
such a short period of time. And I think another
weird thing thinking about this and thinking about it too
for this episode in terms of fun and also you know,
talking about games and toys and the imagination, as we'll
get into, is that we we live in a time
now where I feel like we we definitely have more
understanding of what children are and when, what they're not,
(04:30):
and what they're doing, and that all these things have
a purpose. But it's so easy to sort of fall
back in this older way of thinking and look at
a child playing, a child having fun, and then well,
of course they having fun. They don't have anything else
to do, they don't have a job. Uh, look at
these look at these bumps. But this is frivolous activity, right,
(04:51):
It's it's for some reason, it's still easy to think
think that way, But of course we know better now,
we know that the reality of it is that part
of what makes ldren children is that they are these sponges.
They are absorbing all of this information and then processing it, uh,
coming to terms with it. And so a lot of
the the ideas that they were discussing in this episode, uh,
(05:14):
you know, some of the ones that I'm going to
get into are certainly not the only theories out there,
but a lot of them do involve this this more
nuanced vision of the child and what the child is
doing in the world. Yeah, play is a child's job.
It is them that they're going to school, but in
an unstructured way. Play is how they not just you know. Uh.
(05:34):
You mentioned it's important for them to gather a lot
of data, and that is true. But another way of
thinking about it, children are able to generalize inferences about
how things work, uh, with way less data than you
would expect to say, a computer to need a certain
kind of program to need in order to learn how
something works. So how do children make such powerful general inferences?
(05:58):
How do they figure out rules about how the world
works on the basis of so little experience? I think
play is a big part of this um and so
the paper I wanted to look at again. This is
by Laura E. Schultz and Elizabeth Barreff Bonowitz. It's called
serious fun. Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence
is confounded. This was published in the journal Developmental Psychology
(06:21):
in the year two thousand seven. And this study looks
at a concept that it calls causal knowledge, meaning an
understanding of cause and effect relationships in the environment. Another
way of thinking about it is just understanding how things work. Now,
obviously a major part of child development is this formation
(06:42):
of general causal knowledge. Learning that if you set a
spherical object down on a table and you let go
of it, it can roll off the edge, or learning
that if you turn a door knob it will open
a door, or learning that if you pet the cat
too roughly, the cat might hiss and scratch you. The
world is full of these cause and effect relationships, and
(07:02):
to learn how the world works, you have to not
only learn, but you have to learn how to learn.
You have to, to some extent, understand when a relationship
between two events that you observe is causal and when
that relationship is just random or safe to ignore. So
you have to learn how to tell the difference between Okay,
(07:23):
I pet the cat too rough and it gets angry.
That's clearly causal, Like that not being gentle with the
cat is what made it angry versus, oh, I'm plucking
at the carpet and then a bird lands on the
window sill. Somehow a child usually figures out that that
is not actually causal, that's just random. So how does
a young child master all of this complex inference? Uh?
(07:46):
I think I was just thinking about this, and I
think some inference might be helped along by maybe instinctive
heuristics like physical proximity, like how close is what I
did to the effect that it might have produce boost?
Are they physically connected in some way that I can see? Obviously,
this wouldn't always be the case, especially in a world
(08:07):
full of you know, remote electronics and stuff like that,
but that would help a little bit. Another way of
sifting through inferences to separate the good from the bad
is just by repeating experiments. Whatever you just did, do
it again and see if the same result happens. Of course,
this is useful in in actual scientific experiments. You know,
(08:28):
you want to repeat experiments to see if you get
the same result. But you can observe children naturally doing
this all the time. They'll do something and look for
a result, and then they'll do it again, and they'll
do it again. Of course, in general, children just love repetition. Yeah. Well,
and you might you might plausibly argue that there's a
kind of built in science module in in the child's brain.
(08:52):
I mean, it's not going to be as refined as
a as a carefully scrutinized scientific method planned by adults,
But you could say that there's some kind of instinct
for repetition that might be based on the fact that
repeating experiments gets you better data. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe
that's what's going on when when generally, if there's something funny,
(09:12):
I've noticed that with with kids, like they figured out
a joke that works, whether they're going to keep telling
that joke, keep telling that joke, and then I guess
part of the learning experiment is realizing like how far
how many times can you tell about joke and it's
still elicits a response, Uh, what are the hard limits
to it? So the authors of this developmental psychology paper
are talking about children's acquisition of causal knowledge, and they
(09:36):
write that since basically since Jean Pig, psychologists have mostly
accepted that children construct their causal model of the world
through exploratory play, like this is not something having. Having
causal knowledge is not usually something that has to be
explicitly taught by adults, though and of course in some
limited cases it can be. And it's not something that
(09:58):
just comes was fully built in hardwired instinct. It's something
that children learn through experimenting with the world on their own.
So under this model, a major function of play is learning,
specifically learning to predict cause and effect relationships in the world. Now,
if this model is true, you would expect to see
evidence of that if you just observe the natural patterns
(10:20):
of exploratory play behavior in children. And the authors isolate
one major finding which does seem to back up this
model of the acquisition of causal knowledge, and that is
children's preference for novel stimuli. So the authors don't phrase
it this way, but just my interpretation, I think it
would connect to the idea of like, why do children
want a new toy when they already have toys at home?
(10:44):
I think you could argue that, at least in part
This could be because they already know how the old
toy works. They've used it in a hundred different ways.
They've figured out all the different things that it can
do and what it does when you do different things
to it, And a new toy provides opportunities to learn
new things about something else, something different. Yeah, this of
(11:06):
course is frequently a parental comment about the ephemeral interest
in toys. Right, you get the fancy new toy, it's
played with for a day and then it's on the floor,
and then we quite hypocritically, will say well, why aren't
you still playing with that toy? And if if the
child was savvy, they might say, well, you have top
(11:27):
Gun on VHS. Why aren't you still watching that? Why
did you stop watching that movie? Why isn't that you
just go to movie? You like to watch movies, you
own one, watch it? Um, you know, we're we're not
that that different in that regard. Another big one, of course,
is there's the there's the old toy versus new toy.
But it's something that's always more interesting other kids toys.
(11:47):
Whenever you take the child out, then you're you're I
don't know, you're a friend's house. Or or at a
park and somebody's brought a toy like the toy of
the other child is instantly interesting for this very reason
because it is the new toy. It is the novel toy. Well,
that seems like it might have a double appeal because
not only is it novel, so it has the appeal
that all new things do, but it also has been
(12:09):
sort of pre vetted, like if some other kid is
playing with it, that shows like, okay, there probably is
something good about this toy and it would be worth
my time, right and yeah, and then also there's the
social dynamics of this thing is also desired, and ownership
maybe up in the air on it. But this is
all fascinating thinking about about something about the novel factor here,
(12:32):
because once again makes us think of fun and uh
and the idea of learning from the last episode. So
even if you're just thinking about an object right like
it's there's something even if it's just a tactile experience,
you're interested in in what does it feel like, what
happens when I throw it against a wall, etcetera. And
(12:53):
of course all of this reminds me once more about
the connection that we're looking at between fun and learning, right,
because this paper is looking at a connection between learning
and exploratory play behavior. This is beyond the scope of
the paper itself, but I think it is a totally
reasonable inference to believe that the primary intrinsic motivating factor
(13:15):
driving exploratory play is fun. So like fun is the
is the wages that are paid for the work of play? Yeah,
I thinking of a biblical parallelism, is the wages the
wages of play is fun. It's gonna be the singular,
is right. Yeah. But anyway, so coming back to the
(13:40):
author's introduction on this paper, they say, you know, at
the time this paper was written, there was actually not
a whole lot of evidence for consistent patterns that have
been observed in the exploratory behavior of children. Uh, And
so they're they're going to uh study one pattern in
this experiment they're setting up. But as as preface to that,
(14:01):
they write, quote moreover, considerable research suggests that even older
children and naive adults are poor designing causally informative experiments
and have difficulty anticipating the type of evidence that would
support or undermine causal hypotheses. And then they cite a
whole bunch of studies to back up this assertion. Um.
(14:22):
They write, quote, such findings pose a challenge for the
constructivist account. The number of events children might explore in
principle is vastly greater than the number of events they
can explore in practice. If children's exploratory play is largely unsystematic,
how might they generate the type of evidence that could
support efficient causal learning. So this is a really interesting paradox.
(14:44):
It seems very likely that children learn causal knowledge by
exploratory play, and yet children don't seem by and large
to be very good at designing causally informative experiments like
that they they have double separating out variables and stuff
like that. Nevertheless, children might have some instincts about how
(15:08):
to sift some different types of evidence. Uh and the
authors hypothesized that exploratory playing children might not only be
drawn toward novelty such as here's a new toy or
two perceptual complexity, but also to what they call the
quality of evidence. They observe that there might be a
relationship between a child's desire to play with something and
(15:30):
what type of evidence they are getting from it or
have already gotten from it. Maybe even young children who
are not so great at designing experiments can in in
some senses, tell the difference between informative evidence and uninformative evidence.
They can make predictions based on those differences, and they're
driven to continue playing based on those differences. So what
(15:53):
would be the experiment to test this? Well, they tried
this out on a group of sixty four preschoolers between
forty eight and seventy months of age. This was an
experiment staged at a at a children's museum, and the
experiment goes like this. You've got a special toy built
for the experiment, and the toy takes the form of
a box with a slot at the top and two
(16:15):
levers on the sides. In reality, each lever when you
press it causes one of two different figures to pop
up out of the slot at the top of the box.
There's a puppet figure operated by one lever and a
little duck operated by a different lever. Now, there were
several experimental conditions. One was what they called the confounded
(16:36):
evidence condition UH, and the others were all three different
types of unconfounded evidence conditions. The difference being that in
the unconfounded conditions, the child would one way or another
get to witness or experience unambiguous evidence of how the
box worked, so they would see the levers being operated
(16:56):
separately and they would figure out which lever may which
little figure pop up. But in the confounded condition there
would be unresolved ambiguity after their initial experience with the box,
so the difference was that like in the unconfounded conditions, UH,
there would be a procedure where the child and an
(17:16):
adult experiment or would count to three and then each
press a lever at the same time, and then after
that they would take turns counting to three and pressing
or operating one or the other lever independently for a
total of three presses, but in the end the child
would get to see how what each one did. In
the confounded condition, the child and the experiment or would
(17:39):
always each press their lever at the same time on
the count of three, so it would never be clear
to the child which lever did what. Either lever could
operate each of the figures, or one lever could operate
both of them, or maybe both levers had to be
pressed at the same time to make them pop up.
There would be no way to know bay st on
(18:00):
pressing them at the same time as the experiment er anyway,
So you have these different conditions, and then at the
end of each one, the experimenter would walk away and
tell the child it was okay for them to play
with whatever they wanted. And so then they had the
option to keep playing with the box from the procedure
or reach for a novel box that was also within
arms reach that hadn't been part of the experiment yet.
(18:23):
So what did they find. Well, the previous findings from
other studies about children's preferences for novelty came through. The
kids very often reached for and spent more time playing
with the new toy instead of the toy they had
already played with. But whether or not there was lingering
causal ambiguity about the original box made a big difference.
(18:46):
In the unconfounded conditions, where it was clear how the
box worked, they spent more time playing with the novel toy,
but in the confounded condition, where the original toy remained
a mystery, they spent more time playing with the original
box that they had already played with, And this suggests
that a lack of good evidence about how an object
(19:07):
works is a strong motivating factor driving children towards spending
time in exploratory play with that object, and in some way,
most children can tell when the evidence that they're aware
of is sufficient to understand the workings of the box
or not. Now, there was one funny little note in
(19:28):
their results section where they write that in the confounded
condition where the child hadn't been able to see the
levers operated independently, so didn't know how it worked. Um,
they write quote, in the course of their free play
with the familiar box, children often manipulated the levers simultaneously critically. However,
twelve of the sixteen children or seven also manipulated each
(19:51):
lever separately, fully disambiguating the evidence. So I thought that
was funny that they would they would be curious about Okay,
there would I'm part of them would know I haven't
yet figured out how this box works. And yet what
they would do when they got hold of it often
was initially repeat the same thing that they had already
seen happen, which is pressing both lovers at the same time,
(20:13):
which doesn't tell you anything more than they already learned.
So like like they know that something's wrong, but they
don't always immediately figure out how to disambiguate the confounded evidence. Yeah,
this is fascinating and made me made me think of
like just of course, just sort of basic toy interactions
like it made me think for some reason of the panic, Pete.
(20:33):
Did you do you remember the panic Pete? I'm not sure,
not yet. Describe it to me. A little pink, sort
of limbless clown from outer space, and if you squeeze him,
then the red balls that are in his nose and
at your holes pop out, and also the blue eyes
of his the blue balls of his eye sockets. Yes,
(20:54):
I understand, Panic Pete. Now I seem to recall a
scene in Jurassic Park where Wayne Knight squeezing one of these,
chatting with Mr Hammond. Right, Oh, you may be right.
I forgot about that, but yeah, but you know, it's
one of these things where if you if you bust
out this toy in front of a child and you
squeeze it, you know what the child is going to
want to do. The child needs to squeeze that toy
(21:15):
as well to witness this, to to to to to
have the feeling of of being the the individual in
power over the pete doll uh and then it's and
then of course this would not be a treasured toy
for all eternity. They would squeeze it, however, many many times,
and then you abandon it because it's it's been used.
(21:36):
Panic pete has fulfilled all your curiosity. And even as
a an adult, like that would basically be your experience
with a panic pete. Um someone gave you one, you
would be like, Okay, I'll squeeze this a few times. Interesting,
I have now consumed all of the necessary data, and
I may set the panic pete aside, well, even thinking
about like seeing somebody else squeeze the panic pete and
(21:57):
then um, wanting to squeeze it yourself. I mean, I
do think there is there are some interesting mysteries that
like could fill the child's mind before they get a
chance to try it out, which is like, Okay, would
just squeezing it normally make it make the eyes pop
out and the ears pop out and everything? Or do
I need to squeeze it a special way? Is it
(22:17):
possible I could squeeze it and it wouldn't work? And
then what would I need to figure out how to do? Yeah?
Could I what if I have pushed the eyeballs in
while squeezing the body, what would that do? You know?
They're all these these sort of different ways. It's almost
like a you know, sort of a play testing on it,
you know, like like what what are the what are
the limits of the design? How can I sort of
break the design? Like children want to do that naturally?
(22:40):
And I mean that's one of the ways that toys
get broken because the child doesn't doesn't know the limits
of the design. Yet that's a great point. Yeah, the
play the toy is often played to extinction. Uh, and
the you know, they like the bounds of science go
too far out, like only an adult would say, well,
(23:02):
don't squeeze panic pe too much. Um, if we wanted
to look good on the shelf. No, no, it's not
the child play. But so anyway, to come back to
the study, it's I think this result is really interesting
that children seem to be more motivated to play with
a familiar object if they haven't yet been given evidence
of how all the different parts of that object work.
(23:23):
And this appears true, so they can figure out some
things about what the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence is.
At the same time, there are all these findings that
suggest that children have at least poor metacognitive ability to
design experiments and explain concepts like confounded evidence, and yet
(23:45):
at some gut level they do they are able to
make stuff like that work in practice. Uh. And the
author's right quote, the exploratory play of even very young
children appears to reflect some of the logic of scientific inquiry.
And so, of course, coming back to the idea of
what is the intrinsic motivation driving most exploratory play, I
(24:07):
would say overwhelmingly it is fun. So I think this
is a really interesting piece of evidence that not only
is fun in young children, probably related to learning how
things work. A sense of fun can be generated to
some extent by making the evidence of how something works
remain obscure or ambiguous. And this reminds me of play
(24:31):
patterns I remember from my own childhood, when, like, especially
with certain kinds of electronic toys. You know, like a
toy that would play one of a number of horribly
annoying prerecorded sounds or sayings, um, if it would just
play them in the same orders, like you could cycle
through them and they'd always be in the same order.
Instead of randomized. I remember being kind of disappointed once
(24:55):
I realized that I knew the whole cycle of sounds
by heart, and this kind of meant the fun was over.
Like I'd figure it out and they'd be like, oh,
kind of satisfying feeling, and then it's like, well, this
toy is dead now. Uh, you know it's all It's
like the feeling of fun I got from pressing the
button and making the noise was part of a drive
for discovery of causal knowledge, and once I had the
(25:17):
knowledge firmly in hand, there was not much more fun
to be had with that thing, except maybe by making
other people react to it. M interesting. Yeah, yeah, Like
I think back on on my own play patterns. I
remember like G I Joe figures, the old G I
Joe figures, and I remember reaching a point where it was,
(25:37):
you know, I did a lot of imagination play with them,
but also got to the point where, oh, I have
this tiny screwdriver, and so now I can take them
all apart, and I can put them together in different ways,
and of course you end up with just a tub
of parts and a few assembled uh the soldiers, and
I see pretty much it's a very similar thing with
(25:59):
with my son's a lego obsession is you know, he'll
he'll build the thing. Uh, he'll make his own changes
to it. If it's particularly special, it may live on
a shelf and and sort of have its shelf life
as being a decoration. But generally, even if it's on
the shelf, it may be stripped for parts to create
some new thing. And so you know, it's it's it's
easy for me to come in and be like, well,
(26:20):
what happened to this thing about now it's pieces um,
but like that's part of the process, that's part of
playing with it. It's the one once you've built it
and played with a little bit, it's no longer novel.
It's let's move on to the creation of the next thing.
So anyway, I thought that study was very interesting and
though this is beyond the scope of it, it also
makes me think about the link, even in adults, between
(26:43):
fun and concepts like surprise and mystery. I think there's
often a strong connection there. Yeah, yeah, that like anything
you would you know, any kind of you know, movie,
you're watching, book, you're reading, whatever that has like a
sense of surprise or mystery in it. In a way,
that's sort of keeping you in the fun spirit, even
like a childhood with a novel toy, because you haven't
(27:05):
yet figured out all the mechanics, like it's not clear
how it works. Yeah, I mean, dude, to come back
to video games, for example, I mean, there's there's completing
the game, right, there's completing the story. There's there's also
finding the easter eggs, finding the hidden things in it
um and then perhaps getting into the glitches, finding ways,
figuring out where the seams are, where the imperfections are,
(27:29):
and whatever your level. Like, it's it's ultimately all about
figuring out the thing, understanding the thing, learning the thing.
Now on the subject of fun and toys there you know,
there's of course that additional layer of the imagination we've
(27:49):
alluded to already. You know, it's one thing to figure
out the physical properties of say a stuffed teddy bear
and how it interacts with the world. Very young children
often seem kind of limb into this. You know, you
hand them the stuff bear and what do they do. Well,
they throw the bear against the wall, where they throw
the bear across the car, and then you hand it
back to them and they do it again. It's just
endless fun. Um. And if you were I and if
(28:12):
you're expecting a child like that to spend more time
snuggling the bear or or or giving the bear a
little picnic, you might be disappointed because nothing is as
fun as throwing the bear against the wall. But I mean,
let's you know, let's not under I mean, throwing is fun.
I like throwing too, Yeah, yeah, And of course it's
in a social engagement like this too. You're also you're
(28:33):
not just playing with the bear, You're also playing with
the adult. You're getting a rise out of the adult,
like they're running to get it. It's a big fun
right in a way the other person there is also
the toy, right. But but then there is the level
of the teddy bears picnic. There's the level of of
teddy bears battling each other, battling of their stuffed animals. Um,
(28:54):
the various battles, discoveries, adventures that toys may go on.
And so there's a whole domain fun and with toys,
and certainly even fun without physical totems as well, that
I think we might well consider fun. I mean, it's
just it's fun to engage your imagination in these scenarios
and um, and these aren't really games per se. Like
(29:15):
if teddy bears are having a picnic, unless the child
I don't know has a has just a very gifted
mind for game design, there's probably not a game mechanic
to what's going on. Likewise, if teddy bears are battling
each other or action figures are exploding all over the
living room, right. And in fact, I would say children
often have very poor instincts about how to design a
(29:37):
fun game. Oh good god, yes, I've occasionally there will
be a game that has been designed and I'll be
asked to play it, and um, I mean it's great,
it's great that the mind is already going there. But
you know, early game design is often a bit clunky,
So they have better examples than than than I feel
like I did as a kid. Like I remember designing
(29:57):
horrible games as a as a child out but I
had horrible examples to go off off for the most part. Yeah,
So these activities, you know, they're not really games again,
they lack any uh, you know, rule structure. Instead, they
seem to be orchestrated dramas of the mind that use
physical totems and idols. And this is interesting because, unlike
(30:21):
some of the previous examples, it seems at least like
there's less of a firm connection to learning, right, at
least at first it may seem that way because what
is being learned at the Teddy Bears picnic? You already
know what the bear is. You're not unlocking some mystery
of the object, right. Uh, it's But on the other hand,
if it's not learning as fun than what's going on here,
(30:44):
why is the child doing it? This child who again
is this sponge that has to take in all of
this data about the world and and and essentially a
form an adult mind out of it all. Well, yeah,
but I see what you're saying about that. Even though
it's harder to see exactly how imagination plays about learning,
(31:05):
I would probably liken it too. You know, the difference
between imagination play and playing with the physical object like
a toy that has mechanics is kind of the difference
between a thought experiment and a physical experiment. A thought
experiment can still be informative, it's just it's just an
informative in a looser way, like it relies on you
(31:26):
having good intuitions about what's plausible and what would happen
without checking against the laws of physics. Yeah, yeah, that
I think that does get to some of what seems
to be going on here. And now I want to
drive home that we're not doing an exhaustive look at
imagination play here. There's a lot of scholarship out there
about imagination play and early childhood learning. But so I'm
(31:48):
just essentially carving out like a few thoughts on this
here that I think play well with what we've been
discussing in these these fun episodes. But in the context
of humor on the past episod oades of stuff to
bow your mind, we've discussed incongruity theory before, or more
formally and clearly, incongruity resolution theory. Some incongruity in the
(32:09):
world is observed, and by resolving it, and if we're
talking about humor, we're talking about cracking a joke or
you know, or or engaging with humor of some kind,
we reduce the tension that that incongruity created, and in
doing so we release a feeling of joy. Just a
quick reminder that in that uh, fun, fun, fun study
(32:31):
that we talked about in the previous episode where people
were asked to remember a fun situation and then later
circle all of the words that described it accurately. The
number one word circled was happiness or happy, but the
number two was laughing. So there's clearly a strong natural
association people have between the idea of fun and between
(32:53):
and humor. Yeah. Yeah, So it would be natural that
there would be some overlap between these these areas of study.
So in particular this time around that I was looking
at a book by by Dorothy G. And Jerome L.
Singer from two thousand nine titled The House of Make
Believe that I thought, that's some insightful content in it.
One quote from the book here quote playful interactions between
(33:14):
self and others, or in the case of pure fantasy,
play self and symbolic others, or between self and objects
usually results in a somewhat reduced level of novelty or
incongruity that evokes joy. So the idea of tackling novelty
here this is This is interesting because it does seem
(33:34):
like more we focus on in these episodes, seems like
we're driven to understand something to the point of making
it mundane, where like, give me that novelty. So I
can destroy all of its allure, and once the allure
has been drained from it, then I will discard it,
or I'll put it on the shelf, etcetera. Yeah, it's
like I want to suck all of the fun out
of this thing and make it not fun anymore in
(33:55):
the process, Like the fund is almost a you know,
it's it's not actually a physical abstance in the object,
but it might as well be. And once you have
drained it by extracting all of the novel information that
you can get from it, you've done all the experiments
you can. Now you've taken the fun and it's gone right.
So it's easy to understand that with the object like
(34:16):
the panic pete. You know, you squeeze it, squeeze it
until it's not no longer fun anymore than you get
rid of it. But the world is full of novel
and incongruous things, situations, feelings and more. Um So these
are all things that the child has to has to
has to make sense of and to process. There's a
lot of data coming in and they get has to
(34:37):
deal with it. Uh So this is just one theory, naturally,
but the idea here is that examples of imagination play
dip into the world of simulation and control of incongruous
realities that help us help better prepare us for those realities.
And the control factor is key here as well, because
(34:58):
we're generally considering incong reality in the adult world that
children certainly have no control over. Like there's something there's
something strange in the adult world that you don't fully understand, um,
and you certainly don't have control over it. But then
by engaging in imaginative play, you sort of create a
(35:20):
model of it, a model of what might be going
on or what you've come to understand is going on,
and and it's one that you can control and manipulate. Yeah,
it seems like a lot of the imaginative play behaviors
of children are uh, creating and trying to mimic scenarios
that they would have observed in the adult world, either
you know, in person or in media some way that
(35:41):
they don't fully understand that they partially but don't fully understand,
and trying to act it out or imagine it out
maybe too somehow better grasp how it works. Yeah. Yeah,
they The authors here also point out citing Diana Schmuckler's work.
They point out that brief story, be they real stories
(36:02):
or fictions or myths, etcetera. They assist children in the
creation of schemas or scripts, which, when matched with previously
formed schemes or scripts, can help to reduce fear or
confusion brought on by novelty and incongruity in the world.
And I found that really interesting because it reminds me
of a lot a lot of what what I would
(36:25):
hear as a parent, especially early on with our son
hearing uh, like the doctor asked about imagination play, and like, well,
what is the imagination play consists of? And so forth
and and and certainly parents can think of all sorts
of strange or in hilarious examples of this too. It's
not just a situation where the children are going to
(36:47):
just carry out the same story over and over again
that they've heard. No, there will be tweaks, there will
be changes, and and in to to the parents mind,
it might be strange like, okay, you're doing you're reenacting
this battle from our wars, but the Pokemon are here
as well, and of course they're just you know, or
they're probably better examples of that, and probably more like
(37:08):
sort of personally poignant examples of that. But it's the
taking of these scripts, these schemes, and combining them with
other schemas, putting twists on them, and and and then control.
It's like little thought experiments carried out over and over again.
And I think sometimes it's observed where like there'll be
something like a death, and a child will take death
(37:29):
and introduce death into the imagination play of a given scenario,
and like that's clearly a part of processing what this means. Like,
here's this this huge, um alarming, potentially traumatizing thing that happens,
and and you know, perhaps you haven't been been that
well prepared for it. Where can you test that out?
Where can you process that? Where can you take some
(37:49):
of the edge off of that? But in play, introducing
the unfamiliar into the play makes it fun, It keeps
it fun. Yeah, Yeah, that's another That's that's another important
thing to think about. Like there's this we're drawn to novelty. Well,
if you begin to employ your imagination, you can keep
making something novel. You can keep interjecting the injecting the
(38:13):
novel into the scenario, into the into the toy itself,
even and the game that reminds me to coming back
to games. Uh, like, what is what? What do you
do when you have a successful game that resonates with people? Well,
it's you gotta bust out some some DLC, right, You
gotta bust out some expansions for your board game. You
gotta bust out eventually a sequel, and you you you
(38:33):
stay true to some extent, but you add new features,
You add new you make the familiar novel again, and
that's the key to success. Well, I mean, I think
about the ways that when I was a kid, we
would take a familiar game with physically familiar mechanics such
as Tag and just sort of skin it over with
we are these characters chasing each other, you know, we're
(38:55):
from this movie or and and it would change. Yeah,
you're still going chase, but it takes on this different
imaginative dimension. I wonder, I wonder if anybody's ever experimented
with this, you know, kids playing a common game like
Tag or something and trying out. Okay, now if you
imagine yourself as these characters while playing, does it change
the way they play the game? Do they do anything
(39:17):
physically different? Oh? I bet I I'm almost certain they
do especially if if it involves really embodying certain characters
or animals. I've certainly observed kids playing tag where they'll yeah,
they're all going to be cats and dogs, and it
does seem to change the way that they play. Sometimes
it's a little frightening because they're like, oh man, they're
(39:37):
really really acting like animals out there. Anyway, I think
I think it's all interesting to think about. But again
I want to drive home that that obviously early childhood
development and childhood learning again huge field, lots of work
within those fields. We're only looking at a few examples here,
so please don't take anything we're saying here. It's like
this is this is the golden and uh and only
(39:59):
truth concerning childhood play and imagination, et cetera. All right, well,
I think maybe we're gonna need to call part two
of our series on fun there. We may in fact
be back with the part three. Well, we'll leave that
as a surprise for you. You've got to figure out
how our how our podcast feed works, and you know
we're not going to give you all the clues ahead
of time, right That podcast feed, by the way, is
(40:21):
of course the stuff to blow your mind. Podcast feed
where you'll find core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Monday's we do listener mail, on Wednesday's we do a
short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we
do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside
most serious concerns and just talk about a fun and
weird film. Huch. Thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
(40:43):
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Staff To
All Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i
(41:04):
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our series on fun.
Of course, we all roughly know what fun is. You
(00:24):
know fun when you see it, you know fun when
you're having it, so you got a gut level understanding.
But fun is actually rather difficult to define and to
differentiate from other related concepts like pleasure, happiness, and entertainment.
So we've been trying to to tease out some of
the studies about fun and some observations people can make
about fun and what its unique characteristics are. Now, in
(00:48):
the last episode we talked a bit uh Rob. You
had a section about what particular features make a game fun,
and I thought one of the most interesting things you
brought up there was the suggestion of a natural association
between learning and fun, which is in a way kind
of funny because you can think about very painful attempts
(01:10):
to to make wrote learning quote fun in some way,
you know, adding games in school that are of questionable
fund value sometimes but that could in a way still
be onto something because there may, in fact be um
a major role for fun in the kind of learning
that we do in a non structured way, in a
non school environment, when we're just learning through free exploratory behavior. Yeah. Yeah,
(01:35):
it is fascinating to think about because it made me
think back, certainly on school days and at various age
points and thinking like, well, when did this? When did
it become fun to engage in this quest for learning?
And you know, those are the learning experiences that that
do tend to stand out the most. Yeah, I have
similar experiences. A lot of what I remember most from
(01:56):
school are the things that were the most fun in school. Uh.
And So I wanted to talk about a paper that
I came across that I found pretty interesting. I think, again,
this only addresses one facet of the issue of funds
is it's not going to give you a total view.
But it was a really interesting child psychology paper from
two thousand seven addressing the relationship between toys, fun, and
(02:20):
a child's ability to control natural experiments. So this paper
was by a couple of authors named Laura E. Schultz
and Elizabeth Barreff Bonna Wits. Now for some context, I
was checking out, particularly some of the other research by
Laura Schultz. She actually has a a pretty good TED
talk where she explains sort of the arc of her career.
(02:42):
It's from a few years back, but Schultz is a
professor of cognitive sciences at m I T and a
lot of her research is focused on the question how
do children learn so well? Because children are able to
learn how the world works in a relatively short time,
with relatively limited experiences. I mean, people often phrase this
(03:04):
question about language in particular, I think because language acquisition
is just one of the most amazing things. Yeah, it's
it's astounding, Like the way children acquire language, Like how
do you learn to put together infinitely variable, grammatically functional
sentences just by listening to adults talk for a few years,
(03:24):
Like you don't even have to be taught the rules
of grammar, you know, when you learn grammar in school.
The grammar you're learning there is basically just an analytical
tool or maybe an attempt to kind of regularize or
normalize exactly the way you construct sentences. But you're you're
already able to do so in a functional way, I mean,
(03:45):
where people can understand you. Yeah, the neural plasticity of
children is just absolutely amazing. I know we've we've touched
on it a few times over the over the years,
and yeah, it's it's fascinating to learn about. It's it's
mind blowing to experience in real life and real time
that you sort of lose some of the mystery at
times by being so close to it. But but yeah,
(04:06):
like that they have to acquire so much data in
such a short period of time. And I think another
weird thing thinking about this and thinking about it too
for this episode in terms of fun and also you know,
talking about games and toys and the imagination, as we'll
get into, is that we we live in a time
now where I feel like we we definitely have more
understanding of what children are and when, what they're not,
(04:30):
and what they're doing, and that all these things have
a purpose. But it's so easy to sort of fall
back in this older way of thinking and look at
a child playing, a child having fun, and then well,
of course they having fun. They don't have anything else
to do, they don't have a job. Uh, look at
these look at these bumps. But this is frivolous activity, right,
(04:51):
It's it's for some reason, it's still easy to think
think that way, But of course we know better now,
we know that the reality of it is that part
of what makes ldren children is that they are these sponges.
They are absorbing all of this information and then processing it, uh,
coming to terms with it. And so a lot of
the the ideas that they were discussing in this episode, uh,
(05:14):
you know, some of the ones that I'm going to
get into are certainly not the only theories out there,
but a lot of them do involve this this more
nuanced vision of the child and what the child is
doing in the world. Yeah, play is a child's job.
It is them that they're going to school, but in
an unstructured way. Play is how they not just you know. Uh.
(05:34):
You mentioned it's important for them to gather a lot
of data, and that is true. But another way of
thinking about it, children are able to generalize inferences about
how things work, uh, with way less data than you
would expect to say, a computer to need a certain
kind of program to need in order to learn how
something works. So how do children make such powerful general inferences?
(05:58):
How do they figure out rules about how the world
works on the basis of so little experience? I think
play is a big part of this um and so
the paper I wanted to look at again. This is
by Laura E. Schultz and Elizabeth Barreff Bonowitz. It's called
serious fun. Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence
is confounded. This was published in the journal Developmental Psychology
(06:21):
in the year two thousand seven. And this study looks
at a concept that it calls causal knowledge, meaning an
understanding of cause and effect relationships in the environment. Another
way of thinking about it is just understanding how things work. Now,
obviously a major part of child development is this formation
(06:42):
of general causal knowledge. Learning that if you set a
spherical object down on a table and you let go
of it, it can roll off the edge, or learning
that if you turn a door knob it will open
a door, or learning that if you pet the cat
too roughly, the cat might hiss and scratch you. The
world is full of these cause and effect relationships, and
(07:02):
to learn how the world works, you have to not
only learn, but you have to learn how to learn.
You have to, to some extent, understand when a relationship
between two events that you observe is causal and when
that relationship is just random or safe to ignore. So
you have to learn how to tell the difference between Okay,
(07:23):
I pet the cat too rough and it gets angry.
That's clearly causal, Like that not being gentle with the
cat is what made it angry versus, oh, I'm plucking
at the carpet and then a bird lands on the
window sill. Somehow a child usually figures out that that
is not actually causal, that's just random. So how does
a young child master all of this complex inference? Uh?
(07:46):
I think I was just thinking about this, and I
think some inference might be helped along by maybe instinctive
heuristics like physical proximity, like how close is what I
did to the effect that it might have produce boost?
Are they physically connected in some way that I can see? Obviously,
this wouldn't always be the case, especially in a world
(08:07):
full of you know, remote electronics and stuff like that,
but that would help a little bit. Another way of
sifting through inferences to separate the good from the bad
is just by repeating experiments. Whatever you just did, do
it again and see if the same result happens. Of course,
this is useful in in actual scientific experiments. You know,
(08:28):
you want to repeat experiments to see if you get
the same result. But you can observe children naturally doing
this all the time. They'll do something and look for
a result, and then they'll do it again, and they'll
do it again. Of course, in general, children just love repetition. Yeah. Well,
and you might you might plausibly argue that there's a
kind of built in science module in in the child's brain.
(08:52):
I mean, it's not going to be as refined as
a as a carefully scrutinized scientific method planned by adults,
But you could say that there's some kind of instinct
for repetition that might be based on the fact that
repeating experiments gets you better data. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe
that's what's going on when when generally, if there's something funny,
(09:12):
I've noticed that with with kids, like they figured out
a joke that works, whether they're going to keep telling
that joke, keep telling that joke, and then I guess
part of the learning experiment is realizing like how far
how many times can you tell about joke and it's
still elicits a response, Uh, what are the hard limits
to it? So the authors of this developmental psychology paper
are talking about children's acquisition of causal knowledge, and they
(09:36):
write that since basically since Jean Pig, psychologists have mostly
accepted that children construct their causal model of the world
through exploratory play, like this is not something having. Having
causal knowledge is not usually something that has to be
explicitly taught by adults, though and of course in some
limited cases it can be. And it's not something that
(09:58):
just comes was fully built in hardwired instinct. It's something
that children learn through experimenting with the world on their own.
So under this model, a major function of play is learning,
specifically learning to predict cause and effect relationships in the world. Now,
if this model is true, you would expect to see
evidence of that if you just observe the natural patterns
(10:20):
of exploratory play behavior in children. And the authors isolate
one major finding which does seem to back up this
model of the acquisition of causal knowledge, and that is
children's preference for novel stimuli. So the authors don't phrase
it this way, but just my interpretation, I think it
would connect to the idea of like, why do children
want a new toy when they already have toys at home?
(10:44):
I think you could argue that, at least in part
This could be because they already know how the old
toy works. They've used it in a hundred different ways.
They've figured out all the different things that it can
do and what it does when you do different things
to it, And a new toy provides opportunities to learn
new things about something else, something different. Yeah, this of
(11:06):
course is frequently a parental comment about the ephemeral interest
in toys. Right, you get the fancy new toy, it's
played with for a day and then it's on the floor,
and then we quite hypocritically, will say well, why aren't
you still playing with that toy? And if if the
child was savvy, they might say, well, you have top
(11:27):
Gun on VHS. Why aren't you still watching that? Why
did you stop watching that movie? Why isn't that you
just go to movie? You like to watch movies, you
own one, watch it? Um, you know, we're we're not
that that different in that regard. Another big one, of course,
is there's the there's the old toy versus new toy.
But it's something that's always more interesting other kids toys.
(11:47):
Whenever you take the child out, then you're you're I
don't know, you're a friend's house. Or or at a
park and somebody's brought a toy like the toy of
the other child is instantly interesting for this very reason
because it is the new toy. It is the novel toy. Well,
that seems like it might have a double appeal because
not only is it novel, so it has the appeal
that all new things do, but it also has been
(12:09):
sort of pre vetted, like if some other kid is
playing with it, that shows like, okay, there probably is
something good about this toy and it would be worth
my time, right and yeah, and then also there's the
social dynamics of this thing is also desired, and ownership
maybe up in the air on it. But this is
all fascinating thinking about about something about the novel factor here,
(12:32):
because once again makes us think of fun and uh
and the idea of learning from the last episode. So
even if you're just thinking about an object right like
it's there's something even if it's just a tactile experience,
you're interested in in what does it feel like, what
happens when I throw it against a wall, etcetera. And
(12:53):
of course all of this reminds me once more about
the connection that we're looking at between fun and learning, right,
because this paper is looking at a connection between learning
and exploratory play behavior. This is beyond the scope of
the paper itself, but I think it is a totally
reasonable inference to believe that the primary intrinsic motivating factor
(13:15):
driving exploratory play is fun. So like fun is the
is the wages that are paid for the work of play? Yeah,
I thinking of a biblical parallelism, is the wages the
wages of play is fun. It's gonna be the singular,
is right. Yeah. But anyway, so coming back to the
(13:40):
author's introduction on this paper, they say, you know, at
the time this paper was written, there was actually not
a whole lot of evidence for consistent patterns that have
been observed in the exploratory behavior of children. Uh, And
so they're they're going to uh study one pattern in
this experiment they're setting up. But as as preface to that,
(14:01):
they write, quote moreover, considerable research suggests that even older
children and naive adults are poor designing causally informative experiments
and have difficulty anticipating the type of evidence that would
support or undermine causal hypotheses. And then they cite a
whole bunch of studies to back up this assertion. Um.
(14:22):
They write, quote, such findings pose a challenge for the
constructivist account. The number of events children might explore in
principle is vastly greater than the number of events they
can explore in practice. If children's exploratory play is largely unsystematic,
how might they generate the type of evidence that could
support efficient causal learning. So this is a really interesting paradox.
(14:44):
It seems very likely that children learn causal knowledge by
exploratory play, and yet children don't seem by and large
to be very good at designing causally informative experiments like
that they they have double separating out variables and stuff
like that. Nevertheless, children might have some instincts about how
(15:08):
to sift some different types of evidence. Uh and the
authors hypothesized that exploratory playing children might not only be
drawn toward novelty such as here's a new toy or
two perceptual complexity, but also to what they call the
quality of evidence. They observe that there might be a
relationship between a child's desire to play with something and
(15:30):
what type of evidence they are getting from it or
have already gotten from it. Maybe even young children who
are not so great at designing experiments can in in
some senses, tell the difference between informative evidence and uninformative evidence.
They can make predictions based on those differences, and they're
driven to continue playing based on those differences. So what
(15:53):
would be the experiment to test this? Well, they tried
this out on a group of sixty four preschoolers between
forty eight and seventy months of age. This was an
experiment staged at a at a children's museum, and the
experiment goes like this. You've got a special toy built
for the experiment, and the toy takes the form of
a box with a slot at the top and two
(16:15):
levers on the sides. In reality, each lever when you
press it causes one of two different figures to pop
up out of the slot at the top of the box.
There's a puppet figure operated by one lever and a
little duck operated by a different lever. Now, there were
several experimental conditions. One was what they called the confounded
(16:36):
evidence condition UH, and the others were all three different
types of unconfounded evidence conditions. The difference being that in
the unconfounded conditions, the child would one way or another
get to witness or experience unambiguous evidence of how the
box worked, so they would see the levers being operated
(16:56):
separately and they would figure out which lever may which
little figure pop up. But in the confounded condition there
would be unresolved ambiguity after their initial experience with the box,
so the difference was that like in the unconfounded conditions, UH,
there would be a procedure where the child and an
(17:16):
adult experiment or would count to three and then each
press a lever at the same time, and then after
that they would take turns counting to three and pressing
or operating one or the other lever independently for a
total of three presses, but in the end the child
would get to see how what each one did. In
the confounded condition, the child and the experiment or would
(17:39):
always each press their lever at the same time on
the count of three, so it would never be clear
to the child which lever did what. Either lever could
operate each of the figures, or one lever could operate
both of them, or maybe both levers had to be
pressed at the same time to make them pop up.
There would be no way to know bay st on
(18:00):
pressing them at the same time as the experiment er anyway,
So you have these different conditions, and then at the
end of each one, the experimenter would walk away and
tell the child it was okay for them to play
with whatever they wanted. And so then they had the
option to keep playing with the box from the procedure
or reach for a novel box that was also within
arms reach that hadn't been part of the experiment yet.
(18:23):
So what did they find. Well, the previous findings from
other studies about children's preferences for novelty came through. The
kids very often reached for and spent more time playing
with the new toy instead of the toy they had
already played with. But whether or not there was lingering
causal ambiguity about the original box made a big difference.
(18:46):
In the unconfounded conditions, where it was clear how the
box worked, they spent more time playing with the novel toy,
but in the confounded condition, where the original toy remained
a mystery, they spent more time playing with the original
box that they had already played with, And this suggests
that a lack of good evidence about how an object
(19:07):
works is a strong motivating factor driving children towards spending
time in exploratory play with that object, and in some way,
most children can tell when the evidence that they're aware
of is sufficient to understand the workings of the box
or not. Now, there was one funny little note in
(19:28):
their results section where they write that in the confounded
condition where the child hadn't been able to see the
levers operated independently, so didn't know how it worked. Um,
they write quote, in the course of their free play
with the familiar box, children often manipulated the levers simultaneously critically. However,
twelve of the sixteen children or seven also manipulated each
(19:51):
lever separately, fully disambiguating the evidence. So I thought that
was funny that they would they would be curious about Okay,
there would I'm part of them would know I haven't
yet figured out how this box works. And yet what
they would do when they got hold of it often
was initially repeat the same thing that they had already
seen happen, which is pressing both lovers at the same time,
(20:13):
which doesn't tell you anything more than they already learned.
So like like they know that something's wrong, but they
don't always immediately figure out how to disambiguate the confounded evidence. Yeah,
this is fascinating and made me made me think of
like just of course, just sort of basic toy interactions
like it made me think for some reason of the panic, Pete.
(20:33):
Did you do you remember the panic Pete? I'm not sure,
not yet. Describe it to me. A little pink, sort
of limbless clown from outer space, and if you squeeze him,
then the red balls that are in his nose and
at your holes pop out, and also the blue eyes
of his the blue balls of his eye sockets. Yes,
(20:54):
I understand, Panic Pete. Now I seem to recall a
scene in Jurassic Park where Wayne Knight squeezing one of these,
chatting with Mr Hammond. Right, Oh, you may be right.
I forgot about that, but yeah, but you know, it's
one of these things where if you if you bust
out this toy in front of a child and you
squeeze it, you know what the child is going to
want to do. The child needs to squeeze that toy
(21:15):
as well to witness this, to to to to to
have the feeling of of being the the individual in
power over the pete doll uh and then it's and
then of course this would not be a treasured toy
for all eternity. They would squeeze it, however, many many times,
and then you abandon it because it's it's been used.
(21:36):
Panic pete has fulfilled all your curiosity. And even as
a an adult, like that would basically be your experience
with a panic pete. Um someone gave you one, you
would be like, Okay, I'll squeeze this a few times. Interesting,
I have now consumed all of the necessary data, and
I may set the panic pete aside, well, even thinking
about like seeing somebody else squeeze the panic pete and
(21:57):
then um, wanting to squeeze it yourself. I mean, I
do think there is there are some interesting mysteries that
like could fill the child's mind before they get a
chance to try it out, which is like, Okay, would
just squeezing it normally make it make the eyes pop
out and the ears pop out and everything? Or do
I need to squeeze it a special way? Is it
(22:17):
possible I could squeeze it and it wouldn't work? And
then what would I need to figure out how to do? Yeah?
Could I what if I have pushed the eyeballs in
while squeezing the body, what would that do? You know?
They're all these these sort of different ways. It's almost
like a you know, sort of a play testing on it,
you know, like like what what are the what are
the limits of the design? How can I sort of
break the design? Like children want to do that naturally?
(22:40):
And I mean that's one of the ways that toys
get broken because the child doesn't doesn't know the limits
of the design. Yet that's a great point. Yeah, the
play the toy is often played to extinction. Uh, and
the you know, they like the bounds of science go
too far out, like only an adult would say, well,
(23:02):
don't squeeze panic pe too much. Um, if we wanted
to look good on the shelf. No, no, it's not
the child play. But so anyway, to come back to
the study, it's I think this result is really interesting
that children seem to be more motivated to play with
a familiar object if they haven't yet been given evidence
of how all the different parts of that object work.
(23:23):
And this appears true, so they can figure out some
things about what the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence is.
At the same time, there are all these findings that
suggest that children have at least poor metacognitive ability to
design experiments and explain concepts like confounded evidence, and yet
(23:45):
at some gut level they do they are able to
make stuff like that work in practice. Uh. And the
author's right quote, the exploratory play of even very young
children appears to reflect some of the logic of scientific inquiry.
And so, of course, coming back to the idea of
what is the intrinsic motivation driving most exploratory play, I
(24:07):
would say overwhelmingly it is fun. So I think this
is a really interesting piece of evidence that not only
is fun in young children, probably related to learning how
things work. A sense of fun can be generated to
some extent by making the evidence of how something works
remain obscure or ambiguous. And this reminds me of play
(24:31):
patterns I remember from my own childhood, when, like, especially
with certain kinds of electronic toys. You know, like a
toy that would play one of a number of horribly
annoying prerecorded sounds or sayings, um, if it would just
play them in the same orders, like you could cycle
through them and they'd always be in the same order.
Instead of randomized. I remember being kind of disappointed once
(24:55):
I realized that I knew the whole cycle of sounds
by heart, and this kind of meant the fun was over.
Like I'd figure it out and they'd be like, oh,
kind of satisfying feeling, and then it's like, well, this
toy is dead now. Uh, you know it's all It's
like the feeling of fun I got from pressing the
button and making the noise was part of a drive
for discovery of causal knowledge, and once I had the
(25:17):
knowledge firmly in hand, there was not much more fun
to be had with that thing, except maybe by making
other people react to it. M interesting. Yeah, yeah, Like
I think back on on my own play patterns. I
remember like G I Joe figures, the old G I
Joe figures, and I remember reaching a point where it was,
(25:37):
you know, I did a lot of imagination play with them,
but also got to the point where, oh, I have
this tiny screwdriver, and so now I can take them
all apart, and I can put them together in different ways,
and of course you end up with just a tub
of parts and a few assembled uh the soldiers, and
I see pretty much it's a very similar thing with
(25:59):
with my son's a lego obsession is you know, he'll
he'll build the thing. Uh, he'll make his own changes
to it. If it's particularly special, it may live on
a shelf and and sort of have its shelf life
as being a decoration. But generally, even if it's on
the shelf, it may be stripped for parts to create
some new thing. And so you know, it's it's it's
easy for me to come in and be like, well,
(26:20):
what happened to this thing about now it's pieces um,
but like that's part of the process, that's part of
playing with it. It's the one once you've built it
and played with a little bit, it's no longer novel.
It's let's move on to the creation of the next thing.
So anyway, I thought that study was very interesting and
though this is beyond the scope of it, it also
makes me think about the link, even in adults, between
(26:43):
fun and concepts like surprise and mystery. I think there's
often a strong connection there. Yeah, yeah, that like anything
you would you know, any kind of you know, movie,
you're watching, book, you're reading, whatever that has like a
sense of surprise or mystery in it. In a way,
that's sort of keeping you in the fun spirit, even
like a childhood with a novel toy, because you haven't
(27:05):
yet figured out all the mechanics, like it's not clear
how it works. Yeah, I mean, dude, to come back
to video games, for example, I mean, there's there's completing
the game, right, there's completing the story. There's there's also
finding the easter eggs, finding the hidden things in it
um and then perhaps getting into the glitches, finding ways,
figuring out where the seams are, where the imperfections are,
(27:29):
and whatever your level. Like, it's it's ultimately all about
figuring out the thing, understanding the thing, learning the thing.
Now on the subject of fun and toys there you know,
there's of course that additional layer of the imagination we've
(27:49):
alluded to already. You know, it's one thing to figure
out the physical properties of say a stuffed teddy bear
and how it interacts with the world. Very young children
often seem kind of limb into this. You know, you
hand them the stuff bear and what do they do. Well,
they throw the bear against the wall, where they throw
the bear across the car, and then you hand it
back to them and they do it again. It's just
endless fun. Um. And if you were I and if
(28:12):
you're expecting a child like that to spend more time
snuggling the bear or or or giving the bear a
little picnic, you might be disappointed because nothing is as
fun as throwing the bear against the wall. But I mean,
let's you know, let's not under I mean, throwing is fun.
I like throwing too, Yeah, yeah, And of course it's
in a social engagement like this too. You're also you're
(28:33):
not just playing with the bear, You're also playing with
the adult. You're getting a rise out of the adult,
like they're running to get it. It's a big fun
right in a way the other person there is also
the toy, right. But but then there is the level
of the teddy bears picnic. There's the level of of
teddy bears battling each other, battling of their stuffed animals. Um,
(28:54):
the various battles, discoveries, adventures that toys may go on.
And so there's a whole domain fun and with toys,
and certainly even fun without physical totems as well, that
I think we might well consider fun. I mean, it's
just it's fun to engage your imagination in these scenarios
and um, and these aren't really games per se. Like
(29:15):
if teddy bears are having a picnic, unless the child
I don't know has a has just a very gifted
mind for game design, there's probably not a game mechanic
to what's going on. Likewise, if teddy bears are battling
each other or action figures are exploding all over the
living room, right. And in fact, I would say children
often have very poor instincts about how to design a
(29:37):
fun game. Oh good god, yes, I've occasionally there will
be a game that has been designed and I'll be
asked to play it, and um, I mean it's great,
it's great that the mind is already going there. But
you know, early game design is often a bit clunky,
So they have better examples than than than I feel
like I did as a kid. Like I remember designing
(29:57):
horrible games as a as a child out but I
had horrible examples to go off off for the most part. Yeah,
So these activities, you know, they're not really games again,
they lack any uh, you know, rule structure. Instead, they
seem to be orchestrated dramas of the mind that use
physical totems and idols. And this is interesting because, unlike
(30:21):
some of the previous examples, it seems at least like
there's less of a firm connection to learning, right, at
least at first it may seem that way because what
is being learned at the Teddy Bears picnic? You already
know what the bear is. You're not unlocking some mystery
of the object, right. Uh, it's But on the other hand,
if it's not learning as fun than what's going on here,
(30:44):
why is the child doing it? This child who again
is this sponge that has to take in all of
this data about the world and and and essentially a
form an adult mind out of it all. Well, yeah,
but I see what you're saying about that. Even though
it's harder to see exactly how imagination plays about learning,
(31:05):
I would probably liken it too. You know, the difference
between imagination play and playing with the physical object like
a toy that has mechanics is kind of the difference
between a thought experiment and a physical experiment. A thought
experiment can still be informative, it's just it's just an
informative in a looser way, like it relies on you
(31:26):
having good intuitions about what's plausible and what would happen
without checking against the laws of physics. Yeah, yeah, that
I think that does get to some of what seems
to be going on here. And now I want to
drive home that we're not doing an exhaustive look at
imagination play here. There's a lot of scholarship out there
about imagination play and early childhood learning. But so I'm
(31:48):
just essentially carving out like a few thoughts on this
here that I think play well with what we've been
discussing in these these fun episodes. But in the context
of humor on the past episod oades of stuff to
bow your mind, we've discussed incongruity theory before, or more
formally and clearly, incongruity resolution theory. Some incongruity in the
(32:09):
world is observed, and by resolving it, and if we're
talking about humor, we're talking about cracking a joke or
you know, or or engaging with humor of some kind,
we reduce the tension that that incongruity created, and in
doing so we release a feeling of joy. Just a
quick reminder that in that uh, fun, fun, fun study
(32:31):
that we talked about in the previous episode where people
were asked to remember a fun situation and then later
circle all of the words that described it accurately. The
number one word circled was happiness or happy, but the
number two was laughing. So there's clearly a strong natural
association people have between the idea of fun and between
(32:53):
and humor. Yeah. Yeah, So it would be natural that
there would be some overlap between these these areas of study.
So in particular this time around that I was looking
at a book by by Dorothy G. And Jerome L.
Singer from two thousand nine titled The House of Make
Believe that I thought, that's some insightful content in it.
One quote from the book here quote playful interactions between
(33:14):
self and others, or in the case of pure fantasy,
play self and symbolic others, or between self and objects
usually results in a somewhat reduced level of novelty or
incongruity that evokes joy. So the idea of tackling novelty
here this is This is interesting because it does seem
(33:34):
like more we focus on in these episodes, seems like
we're driven to understand something to the point of making
it mundane, where like, give me that novelty. So I
can destroy all of its allure, and once the allure
has been drained from it, then I will discard it,
or I'll put it on the shelf, etcetera. Yeah, it's
like I want to suck all of the fun out
of this thing and make it not fun anymore in
(33:55):
the process, Like the fund is almost a you know,
it's it's not actually a physical abstance in the object,
but it might as well be. And once you have
drained it by extracting all of the novel information that
you can get from it, you've done all the experiments
you can. Now you've taken the fun and it's gone right.
So it's easy to understand that with the object like
(34:16):
the panic pete. You know, you squeeze it, squeeze it
until it's not no longer fun anymore than you get
rid of it. But the world is full of novel
and incongruous things, situations, feelings and more. Um So these
are all things that the child has to has to
has to make sense of and to process. There's a
lot of data coming in and they get has to
(34:37):
deal with it. Uh So this is just one theory, naturally,
but the idea here is that examples of imagination play
dip into the world of simulation and control of incongruous
realities that help us help better prepare us for those realities.
And the control factor is key here as well, because
(34:58):
we're generally considering incong reality in the adult world that
children certainly have no control over. Like there's something there's
something strange in the adult world that you don't fully understand, um,
and you certainly don't have control over it. But then
by engaging in imaginative play, you sort of create a
(35:20):
model of it, a model of what might be going
on or what you've come to understand is going on,
and and it's one that you can control and manipulate. Yeah,
it seems like a lot of the imaginative play behaviors
of children are uh, creating and trying to mimic scenarios
that they would have observed in the adult world, either
you know, in person or in media some way that
(35:41):
they don't fully understand that they partially but don't fully understand,
and trying to act it out or imagine it out
maybe too somehow better grasp how it works. Yeah. Yeah,
they The authors here also point out citing Diana Schmuckler's work.
They point out that brief story, be they real stories
(36:02):
or fictions or myths, etcetera. They assist children in the
creation of schemas or scripts, which, when matched with previously
formed schemes or scripts, can help to reduce fear or
confusion brought on by novelty and incongruity in the world.
And I found that really interesting because it reminds me
of a lot a lot of what what I would
(36:25):
hear as a parent, especially early on with our son
hearing uh, like the doctor asked about imagination play, and like, well,
what is the imagination play consists of? And so forth
and and and certainly parents can think of all sorts
of strange or in hilarious examples of this too. It's
not just a situation where the children are going to
(36:47):
just carry out the same story over and over again
that they've heard. No, there will be tweaks, there will
be changes, and and in to to the parents mind,
it might be strange like, okay, you're doing you're reenacting
this battle from our wars, but the Pokemon are here
as well, and of course they're just you know, or
they're probably better examples of that, and probably more like
(37:08):
sort of personally poignant examples of that. But it's the
taking of these scripts, these schemes, and combining them with
other schemas, putting twists on them, and and and then control.
It's like little thought experiments carried out over and over again.
And I think sometimes it's observed where like there'll be
something like a death, and a child will take death
(37:29):
and introduce death into the imagination play of a given scenario,
and like that's clearly a part of processing what this means. Like,
here's this this huge, um alarming, potentially traumatizing thing that happens,
and and you know, perhaps you haven't been been that
well prepared for it. Where can you test that out?
Where can you process that? Where can you take some
(37:49):
of the edge off of that? But in play, introducing
the unfamiliar into the play makes it fun, It keeps
it fun. Yeah, Yeah, that's another That's that's another important
thing to think about. Like there's this we're drawn to novelty. Well,
if you begin to employ your imagination, you can keep
making something novel. You can keep interjecting the injecting the
(38:13):
novel into the scenario, into the into the toy itself,
even and the game that reminds me to coming back
to games. Uh, like, what is what? What do you
do when you have a successful game that resonates with people? Well,
it's you gotta bust out some some DLC, right, You
gotta bust out some expansions for your board game. You
gotta bust out eventually a sequel, and you you you
(38:33):
stay true to some extent, but you add new features,
You add new you make the familiar novel again, and
that's the key to success. Well, I mean, I think
about the ways that when I was a kid, we
would take a familiar game with physically familiar mechanics such
as Tag and just sort of skin it over with
we are these characters chasing each other, you know, we're
(38:55):
from this movie or and and it would change. Yeah,
you're still going chase, but it takes on this different
imaginative dimension. I wonder, I wonder if anybody's ever experimented
with this, you know, kids playing a common game like
Tag or something and trying out. Okay, now if you
imagine yourself as these characters while playing, does it change
the way they play the game? Do they do anything
(39:17):
physically different? Oh? I bet I I'm almost certain they
do especially if if it involves really embodying certain characters
or animals. I've certainly observed kids playing tag where they'll yeah,
they're all going to be cats and dogs, and it
does seem to change the way that they play. Sometimes
it's a little frightening because they're like, oh man, they're
(39:37):
really really acting like animals out there. Anyway, I think
I think it's all interesting to think about. But again
I want to drive home that that obviously early childhood
development and childhood learning again huge field, lots of work
within those fields. We're only looking at a few examples here,
so please don't take anything we're saying here. It's like
this is this is the golden and uh and only
(39:59):
truth concerning childhood play and imagination, et cetera. All right, well,
I think maybe we're gonna need to call part two
of our series on fun there. We may in fact
be back with the part three. Well, we'll leave that
as a surprise for you. You've got to figure out
how our how our podcast feed works, and you know
we're not going to give you all the clues ahead
of time, right That podcast feed, by the way, is
(40:21):
of course the stuff to blow your mind. Podcast feed
where you'll find core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Monday's we do listener mail, on Wednesday's we do a
short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we
do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside
most serious concerns and just talk about a fun and
weird film. Huch. Thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
(40:43):
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Staff To
All Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For
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