Tuesday, March 5 at 9:00 am Pacific Time
Guest Speaker: Paul Harris, Harvard University
Please Contact Francine Smolucha at lsmolucha@hotmail.com for the Zoom link (and send her any questions or topics you would like to discuss.)
Summary:
The reality-based imagination of young children is evident in a variety of contexts: early pretend play, envisioning the future, judgments about what is possible, the instructive role of thought experiments, tool-making, and figurative drawing. Children’s imagination helps them to anticipate reality and its close alternatives. This perspective invites future research on the scope of children’s thinking about counterfactual possibilities, their ability to make discoveries about reality on the basis of thought experiments, and the ways in which cultural input can expand the scope of the possibilities that they entertain.
To be notified of comments on this post and keep updated on the discussion, first make a comment and then click the subscribe button below.
According to Vygotsky, pretend play is the highest level of functioning in the preschooler. Paul Harris’ research doesn’t assesses imagination as manifested in pretend play, rather in Harris’ research children are presented a task. During the discussion, Gillian et al were describing a higher level of imagination supported by object manipulations during pretend play. Of particular importance are object substitutions such as using a stick as a riding horse. Add to this that pretend play would contribute to the formation of the Default Mode Network associated with daydreaming (the DMN doesn’t appear in brain imaging until nine years of age), while presenting children with a task requires the functioning of the Executive Control Network (when does that neural network first detected in brain imaging technology such as fMRI?). I will be discussing this further in a tutorial on neural networks that leads up to my presentation on April 23 and Charles Fernyhough’s presentation in June.
Question for Paul Harris.
Reading your compelling synthesis of evidence that young children rely heavily on personal experience in the exercise of their imagination of possible future events, I am struck once again by the powerful strategic influence of Naughty Teddy, whose interventions reported by Margaret Donaldson and others in the 1970s served to call into question some of the theoretical speculations by Piaget and others about the weak logic of young children.
I wonder if the effectiveness of the Naughty Teddy move is partly because it disrupts the latent authoritarian discourse format of Western psychology’s paradigm of testing children for cognitive competencies ?
RS