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All psychologists of child development believe that the main core of developmental theories is interaction of an individual with the environment. Based on the empirical studies of children’s outdoor activities, the environment affects the child behavior; so that by changing the environment, the child behavior will change. Today, the population growth of cities on the one hand, and rising land prices on the other, has created overcrowded residential environments. Living in such environments has had a negative impact on the individual and social health of residents. Children, as the most vulnerable group of society, are at greater risk of being exposed to changes in physical and social environments than other groups. In recent years, due to urbanization problems, life style and building density, the middle area in residential complex is an important space where kids can spend most of their time after school, for leisure and social interaction Since these places are dedicated to the important part of the daily lives of children, so improving their quality can be effective on their overall development. Accordingly, in the present study, designing the middle area of a residential complex as a childlike environment and responsive to the kids play needs (3-6 years old) and consequently affecting their social development has the great importance. Based on the literature review, it can be stated that children tend to physical environment in order to satisfy the play need as a factor of intrinsic motivation. So, they gradually start to make changes to it. Furthermore, the physical environmental stimuli, as a factor of extrinsic motivation, play an important role in kids’ motivation to free play. The result is creating environmental affordances which can be entitled environmental affordances to motivate kids to play, regarding to the theory of affordances. The purpose of environmental affordances to motivate kids to play as the potential affordances or the functional affordances is to make the environment usable for children’s play behavior (autotelic or free play), in a way they have freedom to act in accordance with the goals and motivational resources as well as to interact with the environment. More precisely, quality of the elements and physical components of the environment as the extrinsic motivation factor encourage kids to play. So their motivation to free play will increase in physical environment. The final result is the transformation of the physical environment into a playful environment for kids. Therefore, it is possible to determine the design principles of the middle area in residential complex in such a way that by increasing the kid’s sensory stimulations and social interaction, his or her motivation to play can be increased. In the present research, based on the combination of theories related to the research subject, a mixed method research (Qualitative & Quantitative) was used. Accordingly, the theoretical framework of the research has been developed with a qualitative method and aimed at searching for skeletal-functional and cognitive-behavioral features effective on creating and enhancing kids’ motivation to play. On the other hand, the extent and quality of the impact of each component have been resulted in the transforming of quantitative data into quantitative data. This research has been conducted in three main stages: the first stage (hypothesis formulation) by logical argumentation method, the second stage (hypothesis testing) survey based on Delphi method and the third stage (results validation) by simulation method. In this way, after the sample selection and data collection by means of open form questionnaire and closed form, important factors affecting on kids’ motivation to play were extracted by using factor analysis. These factors were: controllability, child-centered legibility, natural stimulant factors, social interactions (generational- intergenerational), vitality of environment, and also sensory stimulation. Then, based on the correlation between the factors, a linear model was designed. The model was modified by path analysis method while investigating the factors’ relationship and degree of influence on each other. In the following, based on the present model, research literature and the result of open-ended questionnaire, the research hypotheses were analyzed and interpreted. Findings showed that "vitality of environment" and "natural stimulant factors" had a positive and significant effect on "sensory stimulation". The impact of "natural stimulant factors", "vitality of environment", "child-centered legibility" and "controllability" in the middle area of the residential complex has also a positive and significant effect on children's "social interactions (generational- Intergenerational)". After guaranteeing the research hypotheses validity, the design principles of the middle area in residential complex were extracted. In the final stage, these design principles were transformed into comprehensible images for kids, and then put to the test of 3-6 years old kids living in residential complexes. Finally, the design principles confirmed by kids, will be considered as the design principles of the middle area in residential complex which consequently promote Iranian kids’ motivation to play.

The use of a spoon for eating is among the important daily skills in early development. The article provides an analysis of how caregiver-toddler interactions guides the attention of toddlers who were first learning how to use a spoon to spoon-related action opportunities that were relevant to the mealtime context. Our analysis revealed several related results. First, caregivers often manipulated objects on the table (i.e., food and dishes), and toddlers were more likely than chance to use their spoon to contact food immediately after watching these caregiver manipulations. Second, toddlers looked more often at the caregiver's hand than at their face. Third, toddlers tended to look at the caregiver's hand when the caregiver was manipulating objects on the table, and after these looks, toddlers were more likely than chance to contact food with their spoon. Finally, the toddlers' choices about when to look at the caregiver were influenced by their own behavior, as if they wanted to know how the caregiver would react to what they had done. We discuss these results in terms of the learning of socially promoted action opportunities for meal-related spoon use.

Affordances in the home environment are critical to early motor development. Currently, the home environment has not been examined in children with deafblindness or severe disabilities. The present study examined differences in, and relationships between, the home environment and motor development in children with and without CHARGE syndrome. CHARGE syndrome is a low-incidence, complex disorder with sensory and motor impairments. Participants included 28 parents of children with CHARGE syndrome and 32 parents of children without disabilities. Children with CHARGE syndrome achieved motor milestones significantly later and had fewer outside space affordances than children without disabilities. Older children had a greater variety of stimulation and fine motor toys, and those that achieved independent walking later had more outside space and fine and gross motor toys. Early experiences may be more important for children with CHARGE syndrome than children without disabilities. Moreover, parents can play a vital role in their children’s motor development to help them reach their motor milestones.

During growth, children are influenced by an extensive network, in which more favorable contexts provide better affordance landscapes, and consequently have a better potential to foster child development. We aimed to examine the affordances provided to children using the Affordances for Motor Behavior of Schoolchildren (AMBS) tool, estimating its association with children?s motor competence, as assessed by the Motor Competence Assessment (MCA) battery. Seventy-two Brazilian children were evaluated using the MCA instrument. Their parents/guardians completed the AMBS. The correlations between the two instruments (sub-scales and total scores) were investigated. ANOVAs were used to compare the motor competence performance of children with Low, Average, and High AMBS scores. Positive associations were found between AMBS and MCA, although weak to moderate in nature. In addition, children whose environments were richer in motor affordances (higher AMBS scores) showed significantly higher levels on the MCA. This study provides evi dence that AMBS is a valid tool for assessing motor affordances for schoolchildren, and that those affordances are related to children?s motor competence. 4811-99FE-2ECD | Luis Paulo Rodrigues N/A

Artigo de revisão de literatura que aborda a ludicidade e o desenvolvimento infantil com base nas teorias interacionistas. Estudos na área neurocientífica e fisiológica confirmam que brincadeiras envolvendo formas simbólicas desenvolvem habilidades cognitivas e de linguagem, favorecem a compreensão, significação e a capacidade de solucionar problemas, além de trazer bem-estar emocional às crianças. Com foco no processo de design gráfico, este artigo tem como objetivo relacionar o aparecimento da dimensão simbólica e das habilidades cognitivas e as interações infantis com objetos singulares como os livros-brinquedo, especialmente no período de alfabetização. Relações estas que envolvem o estudo das representações do conhecimento, ou seja, a forma como as percepções ocorrem internamente, destacando a significação e a emoção durante o brincar. Esse estudo faz parte da pesquisa em andamento: “Desenvolvimento de heurísticas a partir da teoria dos affordances para o design de livro-brinquedo”.

In this experience report, we describe an AI summer workshop designed to prepare middle school students to become informed citizens and critical consumers of AI technology and to develop their foundational knowledge and skills to support future endeavors as AI-empowered workers. The workshop featured the 30-hour "Developing AI Literacy" or DAILy curriculum that is grounded in literature on child development, ethics education, and career development. The participants in the workshop were students between the ages of 10 and 14; 87% were from underrepresented groups in STEM and Computing. In this paper we describe the online curriculum, its implementation during synchronous online workshop sessions in summer of 2020, and preliminary findings on student outcomes. We reflect on the successes and lessons we learned in terms of supporting students' engagement and conceptual learning of AI, shifting attitudes toward AI, and fostering conceptions of future selves as AI-enabled workers. We conclude with discussions of the affordances and barriers to bringing AI education to students from underrepresented groups in STEM and Computing.

There is significant interest in the ways the human body, both one's own and that of others, is represented in the human brain. In this chapter we focus on body representations in infancy and synthesize relevant findings from both infant cognitive neuroscience and behavioral experiments. We review six experiments in infant neuroscience that have used novel EEG and MEG methods to explore infant neural body maps. We then consider results from behavioral studies of social imitation and examine what they contribute to our understanding of infant body representations at a psychological level. Finally, we interweave both neuroscience and behavioral lines of research to ground new theoretical claims about early infant social cognition. We propose, based on the evidence, that young infants can represent the bodily acts of others and their own bodily acts in commensurate terms. Infants initially recognize correspondences between self and other-they perceive that others are "like me" in terms of bodies and bodily actions. This capacity for registering and using self-other equivalence mappings has far-reaching implications for mechanisms of developmental change. Infants can learn about the affordances and powers of their own body by watching adults' actions and their causal consequences. Reciprocally, infants can enrich their understanding of other people's internal states by taking into account the way they themselves feel when they perform similar acts. The faces, bodies, and matching actions of people are imbued with unique meaning because they can be mapped to the infant's own body and behavior.

Objective: This study investigated the effects of motor affordances in the home environment on fine- and gross motor skills of young children aged of 18–42 months. Methodology: Homes were assessed ...

Purpose To determine the feasibility of completing a randomized clinical trial of motor affordance program at home for infants living in poverty. Methods Fourteen infants living in poverty were randomized assigned to groups: intervention at 1st month (G-1), and at 2nd month (G-2). They were assessed into 3 visits: Visit 1 (baseline), Visit 2 (after 4 weeks), and Visit 3 (after 8 weeks). The motor affordance program was provided at home by parents/caregivers. To determine feasibility of the program, descriptive data was used. Effect sizes and non-parametric analysis were performed for motor and affordances at home. Results The motor affordance program was considered feasible and showed improvement on affordances at home and motor performance only for G-2. Conclusion Amplifying motor affordance at home may be considered appropriate for future clinical trials. It may be an efficient/low-cost early intervention strategy for infants at environmental risk.

Forest School focuses on child development underlining nature-connection and play pedagogy. Practitioners facilitate child-led learning through a deep observation approach. However, challenges and assumptions exist in such approaches. Additionally, a critical examination of the practice reveals that it may be lacking a solid theoretical underpinning that can respond to diverse contexts and participants while escaping a one-size-fits-all approach encouraged by commercialisation. Ecological Dynamics offers a theoretical framework that has the potential to guide Forest School practice and clarify its effectiveness. Specifically, notions of affordances combined with analysis at the level of person-environment relationships could guide future design and implementation of activities. Benefits could include realising and attuning to affordances which have sociocultural and individual connotations, thereby respecting local cultures and their community resources. The role of the Forest School practitioner becomes one of facilitating diverse populations in their perception of affordances in nature for individualised benefits, including well-being.

Institutional objects, such as money, drivers’ licenses, and borders, have functions because of their social roles rather than their immediate physical properties. These objects are causally different than standard artifacts (e.g. hammers, chairs, and cars), sharing more commonality with other social roles. Thus, they inform psychological theories of human-made objects as well as children’s emerging understanding of social reality. We examined whether children (N = 180, ages 4-9) differentiate institutional objects from standard artifacts. Specifically, we examine whether children understand that mutual intentions (i.e., the intentions of a social collective) underlie the functional affordances of institutional objects in ways that they do not for standard artifacts. We find that young children assimilate institutional objects into their intuitive theories of standard artifacts; children begin to differentiate between the domains in the elementary school years.

This investigation examined developmental change in how children perceive and act on dynamic affordances when crossing roads on foot. Six- to 14-year-olds and adults crossed roads with continuous cross-traffic in a large-screen, immersive pedestrian simulator. We observed change both in children's gap choices and in their ability to precisely synchronize their movement with the opening of a gap. Younger children were less discriminating than older children and adults, choosing fewer large gaps and more small gaps. Interestingly, 12-year-olds' gap choices were significantly more conservative than those of 6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds, and adults. Timing of entry behind the lead vehicle in the gap (a key measure of movement coordination) improved steadily with development, reaching adultlike levels by age 14. Coupled with their poorer timing of entry, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds' gap choices resulted in significantly less time to spare and more collisions than 14-year-olds and adults. Time to spare did not differ between 12-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and adults, indicating that 12-year-olds' more conservative gap choices compensated for their poorer timing of entry. The findings show that children's ability to perceive and act on dynamic affordances undergoes a prolonged period of development, and that older children appear to compensate for their poorer movement timing skills by adjusting their gap decisions to match their crossing actions. Implications for the development of perception-action tuning and road-crossing skills are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Young children typically demonstrate low rates of tool innovation. However, previous studies have limited children's performance by presenting tools with opaque affordances. In an attempt to scaffold children's understanding of what constitutes an appropriate tool within an innovation task we compared tools in which the focal affordance was visible to those in which it was opaque. To evaluate possible cultural specificity, data collection was undertaken in a Western urban population and a remote Indigenous community. As expected affordance visibility altered innovation rates: young children were more likely to innovate on a tool that had visible affordances than one with concealed affordances. Furthermore, innovation rates were higher than those reported in previous innovation studies. Cultural background did not affect children's rates of tool innovation. It is suggested that new methods for testing tool innovation in children must be developed in order to broaden our knowledge of young children's tool innovation capabilities.

Through development, a child's varied movement contexts provide different opportunities or affordances for action that are fundamental to promoting motor competence. Although home is the primary environment for infants, as children age, school and sport environments gain importance. Studies focusing on affordances for motor behavior in children have mainly addressed the home microsystem, providing an incomplete picture of affordances across different settings, particularly later in development. Here, we undertook a narrative literature review of various affordances for children's motor development. This review revealed that prior studies of school and sports contexts have not specifically focused on those environmental properties that promote or hinder motor learning opportunities, meaning that future research should assess these relationships through manipulations of environmental features in these different microsystems.

New advances in neurobiology are revealing that brain development and the learning it enables are directly dependent on social-emotional experience. Growing bodies of research reveal the importance...

Clinical assessment of movement and posture guides the decision-making process in designing interventions for infants and children with movement disorders. Clinical reasoning is influenced by the therapist's understanding of developmental processes. The views of development grounded in perception-action, dynamic systems, and neuronal group selection theories are well recognized in current literature and supported by a large body of research. Based on the available evidence, intervention must be task-specific, repetitive, and highly salient to the child. Furthermore, it must honor spontaneous exploration and active problem-solving, enhance the child's ability to perceive environmental affordances, and target optimal variability and adaptability of movement and posture. However, a neuromaturational approach to developmental assessment and intervention that relies on “teaching” motor milestones and emphasizes the importance of correcting movement patterns in infants and children developing atypically is still prevalent in the clinic. This perspective paper will: (1) examine evidence in support of a paradigm shift from neuromaturational views toward bringing the concepts of grounded cognition, variability, complexity, and adaptability to the forefront of clinical reasoning; and (2) introduce the Perception-Action Approach as a method of assessment and intervention that may serve as an agent of such a shift by augmenting knowledge translation for the clinician.

The home environment has been established as a crucial factor for motor development, especially in infants. Exploring the home environment can have significant implications for intervention, as it is common practice in physical therapy to have professionals advise patients on home activities. Since 2010, our group has been working on the development of the Affordances in the Home Environment for Motor Development - Infant Scale (AHEMD-IS), a parental self-reporting instrument designed to assess the quality and quantity of factors (affordances) in the home environment. In Brazil, the instrument has been translated as "Affordances no Ambiente Domiciliar para o Desenvolvimento Motor - Escala Bebê", and it has been extensively used in several studies that address infant development. These studies in Brazil and other parts of the world highly recommended the need for a normative sample and standardized scoring system. A description of the study that addressed that need, along with the English version of the questionnaire and score sheets, was recently published in the well-known and respected journal Physical Therapy. Our intent with the present short communication is to notify Brazilian investigators and clinicians of this latest update so they can download the new instrument, as well as present the Brazilian (Portuguese) version of the AHEMD-IS along with its scoring system.

This study presents a prototype of an augmented reality (AR) mobile application aimed at visualizing infants’ natural-setting motor and cognitive development for prevention of accidents and promotion of development. To provide adults with better understanding about the infants’ encounters with surrounding objects by visualization of actual recoded data, the study comprised three steps. First, we conducted longitudinal observations of 10 infants (6 males, 4 females), aged 4–12 months, at their homes in Tokyo, Japan. Second, we developed an AR application for iPhones and iPads, by using vision-based marker tracking technique. Based on the observations, 10 most frequently observed objects were adapted as markers for AR. To ensure privacy and to focus on infant–object interactions, we converted all AR movies to line drawings. Third, we conducted informal user interviews and user tests to confirm the method’s validity and usability. The longitudinal observational data shed light on the infants’ perceptions and actions, helping to clarify not only developmental possibilities but also risks of accidents. The user interview suggested that our prototype could scope out the home from infants and can help adults to obtain insights for encouraging child development and reevaluating childproofing home as an ongoing process.

There are some concerns that children today may be less calibrated to their action capabilities because of the “risk-free” culture that has proliferated during recent decades. This study investigated the extent to which judgments of reaching affordances presented in different directions (i.e., overhead, diagonal, and horizontal) are related to children’s climbing behavior on a climbing wall. A sample of 30 schoolchildren from 6 to 11 years old (20 boys and 10 girls) estimated maximum reach and grasp distances and subsequently attempted to climb across an indoor climbing wall. Children who perceived the extents of their reach more accurately completed the climb more often and more quickly. Judgments in the primary directions of climbing locomotion (horizontal and diagonal) were better predictors of success than vertical judgments. Judgments about whether objects are reachable and graspable are complex and influenced by various dynamic factors (including perceptual–motor calibration), and as such different levels of accuracy are likely in different reaching directions. It appears that young children are relatively sensitive to their action boundaries for climbing and, therefore, may be able to make informed decisions themselves about whether a surface is climbable.

Researching with children is fundamental for furthering our understanding of children's occupational worlds. Furthermore, researching occupation from a transactional perspective is important for gaining a deeper understanding. However historically, most approaches to researching with children do not capture the transactional nature of occupation. The use of video methods in qualitative research is proposed as a potential solution. This article illustrates how videography can be used as an effective, inclusive qualitative research method, and uses a study of infant play occupation to illuminate video techniques. Drawing on a longitudinal study with five infants and their families, methodological challenges are presented. We discuss key considerations in data generation and analysis when utilizing videography and outline insights gained regarding infant occupational development and meaning-making in the physical environment. Video methods are an effective means of researching from a transactional perspective and have potential to strengthen occupation-centered research particularly with infants. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

A child-friendly environment is a place that provides children with opportunities for their activities, or from the ecological perspective, a rich-affordances environment. However, children’s environments are often designed by adults who may have an insufficient understanding of children’s needs, potentially causing a disconnect between affordances provided and those actualised by children. To address this issue, we posit developmental-affordances as an approach to designing a place for children, which integrates the theoretical perspectives of affordances and child development. Affordance theory indicates that an environment affords people with opportunities for action, and emphasises the relative functions of the environment according to the perceiver’s capabilities to respond to those opportunities. However, affordances can be more effective for designing a child-friendly place if it is informed by an understanding of the developmental stages. This knowledge will illuminate designers with ideas for environmental features and activities that naturally attract children as the configuration of affordances are actualised to support their development. Moreover, as child development takes place within a specific context, designers should also note the influence of social and physical properties of an environment that might support and thwart children’s motivation to actualise the potential affordances.

This study examined the influence of spending time outdoors on young children’s physical and socioemotional development. We observed preschoolers’ activities in two naturally provisioned outdoor environments over the course of one year. Eleven preschoolers were videotaped continuously for 16 days at a local river and 9 days at a creek adjacent to the school. In addition to the quantitative analyses of children’s behaviors, a case study of three children’s experiences over the course of the year was conducted. Both the river and the creek settings encouraged a multitude of physical and play behaviors with similar types of affordances, including flat surfaces for running, rocks for climbing and jumping off, and water for exploration and play, but the wilder environment (river) afforded more risk and personal challenges. Observations of children’s motor activities, play and responses to challenging environmental features supported the importance of accumulated experience and social context for the developmen...

International audience; Infants’ own activities create and actively select their learning experiences. Here we review recent models of embodied information seeking and curiosity-driven learning and show that these mechanisms have deep implications for development and evolution. We discuss how these mecha- nisms yield self-organized epigenesis with emergent ordered behavioral and cognitive develop- mental stages. We describe a robotic experiment that explored the hypothesis that progress in learning, in and for itself, generates intrinsic rewards: The robot learners probabilistically selected experiences according to their potential for reducing uncertainty. In these experiments, curiosity- driven learning led the robot learner to successively discover object affordances and vocal interac- tion with its peers. We explain how a learning curriculum adapted to the current constraints of the learning system automatically formed, constraining learning and shaping the developmental trajec- tory. The observed trajectories in the robot experiment share many properties with those in infant development, including a mixture of regularities and diversities in the developmental patterns. Finally, we argue that such emergent developmental structures can guide and constrain evolution, in particular with regard to the origins of language.

Within a perception-action framework, exploration is seen as a driving force in young children's development. Through exploration, children become skilled in perceiving the affordances in their environment and acting on them. Using a perception-action framework, the current study examined the development of children's exploration of the spatial-relational properties of objects such as the possibility of containing or stacking. A total of 61 children, belonging to two age cohorts, were followed from 9 to 24 months and from 20 to 36 months of age, respectively. Exploration of a standard set of objects was observed in five home visits in each cohort conducted every 4 months. A cohort-sequential augmented growth model for categorical data, incorporating assumptions of item response theory, was constructed that fitted the data well, showing that the development of exploration of spatial-relational object properties follows an overlapping waves pattern. This is in line with Siegler's model (Emerging Minds, 1996), which suggested that skill development can be seen as ebbing and flowing of alternative (simple and advanced) behaviors. Although the probability of observing the more complex forms of exploration increased with age, the simpler forms did not disappear altogether but only became less probable. Findings support a perception-action view on development. Individual differences in observed exploration and their relations with other variables, as well as future directions for research, are discussed.

The definition of self and others can be regarded as embodying the two dimensions of autonomy and relatedness. Autonomy and relatedness are two basic human needs and cultural constructs at the same time. This implies that they may be differently defined yet remain equally important. The respective understanding of autonomy and relatedness is socialized during the everyday experiences of daily life routines from birth on. In this paper, two developmental pathways are portrayed that emphasize different conceptions of autonomy and relatedness that are adaptive in two different environmental contexts with very different affordances and constraints. Western middle-class children are socialized towards psychological autonomy, i.e. the primacy of own intentions, wishes, individual preferences and emotions affording a definition of relatedness as psychological negotiable construct. Non-Western subsistence farmer children are socialized towards hierarchical relatedness, i.e. positioning oneself into the hierarchical structure of a communal system affording a definition of autonomy as action oriented, based on responsibility and obligations. Infancy can be regarded as a cultural lens through which to study the different socialization agendas. Parenting strategies that aim at supporting these different socialization goals in German and Euro-American parents on the one hand and Nso farmers from North Western Cameroon on the other hand are described. It is concluded that different pathways need to be considered in order to understand human psychology from a global perspective.