This paper explores how preschools can be purposefully designed to aid cultural learning through guided play practices. In recent literature, there has been a renowned interest in the role of the exogenous environment in psychological processes, including learning. The idea that the design of preschools can meaningfully be seen as cultural niche construction and that guided play practices in these environments can aid the preparation for cultural action, is promoted, and a theoretical framework is presented. The empirical data draw from (...) a synthesis from three ethnographic research sites in multilingual communities, and data are used to explore how cultural affordances are used in designed environments as part of guided play practices. The results indicate how niche construction of affordances aid cultural learning and is achieved through both direct guided play interaction between teachers and children, but also in the way of the indirect design of environments that is incorporated in children’s peer play. It is discussed what this means for play research as well as for guided play practices that aim to promote cultural learning. (shrink)

By conceptualizing Sexual Selection, Darwin showed a way to analyze intra-specific individual differences within an evolutionary perspective. Interestingly, Sexual Selection is often used to investigate the origins of sports, arts, humor, religion and other phenomena that, in several languages, are simply called “play.” Despite their manifested differences, these phenomena rely on shared psychological processes, including playfulness. Further, in such behaviors there is usually considerable individual variability, including sex differences, and positive relationship with mating success. However, Sexual Selection is rarely applied (...) in the study of play, with exception to what is concerned as infant training behavior for adult sex roles. We offer an integrated grounding of playful phenomena aligning evolutionary propositions based on sexual selection, which might stimulate further exploration of playfulness within evolutionary perspective. (shrink)

Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term “pretensive shared reality;” Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with (...) shared intentionality in anad hocmanner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a players sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily co-operative and co-creative. We draw on multiple examples, and focus on Table-Top Role Playing games (TTRPG) – and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) – as a primary example of such play. Our conception of “pretensive shared reality” links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities – which underpin many forms of imaginative culture – are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains. (shrink)