The exploration and/or manipulation of objects and materials, referred to as object-oriented play (OOP), is one of the most prominent activities children engage in during early childhood. Especially within early childhood education, it is important to be able to assess and understand OOP, its developmental trajectory, and developmental value. This…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

The grounding of cognition in embodied actions has resulted in both theoretical formulations of encoding of information and instructional applications of these encodings. Actions on objects typically occur within matched formats: physical actions on physical objects, virtual actions on virtual objects, or mental actions on mental objects. Instead,…

The emerging field of mathematics educational neuroscience provides researchers with new approaches to understanding mathematical development, as well mathematics itself. This paper focuses on the role of the hand in constructing mathematics through activity. We rely on Piaget's distinction of three kinds of activity: sensorimotor activity,…

Previous papers in these pages have dealt empirically with the child's first words, the child's first imitations, and the use of yes/no and wh-questions with infants. In this study, we touch on all these issues, but attempt to place them in a systemic-functional language framework and a cultural-historical learning one. First, we deal with some of…

This paper pays attention to the meaning of things in educational space. Students learn not only from words but also things with which they interact in the learning process. Especially in art education various things such as materials, tools, art works are indispensable. This paper tries to analyze the process of both creation and appreciation of…

Motor affordances have been shown to play a role in visual object identification and categorization. The present study explored whether working memory is likewise supported by motor affordances. Use of motor affordances should be disrupted by motor interference, and this effect should be larger for objects that have motor affordances than for…

We assessed the effects of varying the treatment integrity of a prompting procedure on appropriate toy manipulation in two preschool-aged children with autism. Following an assessment to identify toys with high levels of inappropriate toy manipulation, each of three toys was associated with implementation of the prompting procedure at a different…

We investigated infants' ability to recognize the similarity between observed and implied goals when actions differed in surface-level motion details. In two experiments, 10- to 12-month-olds were habituated to an actor manipulating an object and then shown test actions in which the actor contacted the object with a novel hand configuration that…

Reaching and grasping skills have been described to emerge from a dynamic interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the interaction between such an intrinsic factor, Down syndrome, and extrinsic factors, such as different object properties. Seven infants with Down syndrome and seven…

Tool making evidences intelligent, flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, we confirmed that 4- to 7-year-olds chose a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tube. In Experiment 2, 3- to 5-year-olds consistently failed to innovate a simple hook tool. Eight-year-olds performed at mature levels. In contrast, making a tool following demonstration was easy…

We examined automatic spatial alignment effects evoked by handled objects. Using color as the relevant cue carried by an irrelevant handled object aligned or misaligned with the response hand, responses to color were faster when the handle aligned with the response hand. Alignment effects were observed only when the task was to make a reach and…

Reading comprehension, much like comprehension of situations and comprehension of oral language, is embodied. In all cases, comprehension is the ability to take effective action on the basis of affordances related to the body, the physical world, and personal goals and cultural norms. In language contexts, action-based comprehension arises from…

Reading provides information across the curriculum. Thus, to the extent that fundamental (i.e., generalizable) reading comprehension strategies can be taught, the benefits should be found in multiple domains. To test this claim, children in the third and fourth grades read by simulating text content using the two-part, embodied "Moved by Reading"…

Grip selection tasks have been used to test "planning" in both autism and developmental coordination disorder (DCD). We differentiate between "motor" and "executive" planning and present a modified motor planning task. Participants grasped a cylinder in 1 of 2 orientations before turning it clockwise or anticlockwise.…