Museum of Science, Boston

Learning Through Play

It is widely believed that children learn by playing, but if you observe children’s play activities, you may notice that the process of ‘playing’ is inherently unsystematic. This contradiction has made the question of how children learn during play of particular interest to parents, teachers and researchers. To find out what play is all about, cognitive scientists have developed and are testing theories about how children might learn through play.

Categories

How do children remember the things that they see?

For adults, categories help us to remember things. Although the visual world is dynamic and complicated, we can use our knowledge of categories to carve up a scene and to store information efficiently in the brain. Past work has shown that people are sometimes better at remembering multiple images if they come from different categories (i.e., two faces and two scenes) rather than a single category (i.e., four faces). This study aims to understand how categorizing visual images helps children remember what they see. Because children are still learning new categories, they provide a window into the way that we use our knowledge of categories to boost our memory for visual scenes.

In this study, children (ages 3-7) view pictures on a computer screen. Four pictures appear at once, followed by a blank screen, followed by another set of four pictures. For each set of pictures, we ask children to tell us whether all four of the pictures are the same as before, or if one of them has changed. Sometimes all four pictures will show items from one category (e.g., four faces), and sometimes they will show items from two different categories (e.g., two faces and two scenes). We plan to compare how often children detect changes when all four images come from a single category versus different categories.

By understanding how children use their knowledge of object categories during these types of memory games, we can gain insights into the ways that new concepts might influence our ability to take in and remember information in daily life.

Learn about other research related to Learning Through Play.

This research is conducted by the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University

Try it at the Museum

Categorization and classification

Children categorize objects even as infants! Check out the Legs & Wheels toys in the Discovery Center. Encourage your child to play with the toys and observe what they do. Can you tell which toys they think are closely related to one another, and which ones are different? How do they make the toys move around? Do they think that the “mixed-up” toys are vehicles, animals, or something else entirely? Toddlers may be able to tell you what they think about each toy, and group them into two or more piles. Older children might be able to group them in a few different ways. How many different ways can you come up with to classify them?

Try it at Home

Test your memory

Look around your home and find some items to memorize – a list of numbers, a set of words, a sequence of music notes, or a group of objects. Try memorizing sets of different sizes and types. What sorts of sets are easiest to remember? Which are the hardest?

Does it help if you can break the group down into meaningful units? Try to remember the letter sequence CBSNBCABC. It is probably pretty difficult. But now try to remember the same sequence chunked into units CBS NBC ABC. It becomes easier. Our knowledge about these particular sequences (as television stations) allows us to better remember this sequence. Can you find other examples where knowledge about items helps us group them and remember them?