Engagement in Sociodramatic Play Predicts Preschoolers’ Executive Function Gains Across the School Year

• In Event: 1-142 - A Multicontextual Examination of Imagination in Development: Exploring Culture, Social Environment, Cognition, and Morality

Integrative Statement

Recent experimental evidence suggests that engaging in dramatic play can improve children’s executive functions (EFs; i.e, cognitive processes involved in regulating thought, action, and emotion; e.g., Thibodeau et al., 2016; White et al., 2015). Yet, evidence regarding how play relates to the in vivo development of EF remains sparse. Although one pioneering observational study linked dramatic play to social compliance (Elias & Berk, 2002), no extant research has investigated the role of observed play behaviors in the development of EF as currently defined (i.e., cognitive control). Further research is also needed to elucidate the relation between EF and dramatic play in social versus solitary contexts to better understand how pretense is related to EF. Drawing on Vygotskian theory (1933/1978), this relation could be driven solely by symbolic demands inherent in solitary-dramatic play, or it could be driven by the combined effects of symbolism and social interaction inherent in social-dramatic play. Therefore, the current study investigated whether preschoolers’ social and solitary dramatic play over the course of one school year predicted growth in EF.

Participants were 139 Spanish-speaking children (Mage = 52.60 months; 53% boys; 87% Latino) from 10 Head Start classrooms in the southwest United States. Multiple 15-second naturalistic observations of children’s interactions (e.g., social, solitary) and activities (e.g., art, dramatic play, large-motor) were gathered across free-play classroom contexts throughout one preschool year (M observations/child = 16.64; Martin & Fabes, 2001). To account for the varying number of total observations per child, we divided raw counts of both social-dramatic and solitary-dramatic play observations by the total number of free-play observations. To gauge EF, children completed the Day-Night task (Gerstadt et al., 1994) in the fall and spring.

Mixed-model repeated-measures analyses controlling for gender and receptive vocabulary confirmed that children’s EFs improved from fall (M = 4.14, SD = 5.09) to spring (M = 7.64, SD = 6.22). Above and beyond gains associated with time, gender, and vocabulary skills, the proportions of social-dramatic and solitary-dramatic play observations each contributed to children’s EF gains across the school year (see Table 1, Models 1 & 2). When both types of play were included in a joint model, the effects of solitary-dramatic play disappeared, suggesting that social-dramatic play is the stronger predictor of EF gains (see Model 3). Finally, to rule out the possibility that social-dramatic play findings were simply driven by social experiences, we entered proportion of non-dramatic social play (e.g., running with peers) and proportion of social-dramatic play into the same model; only social-dramatic play contributed to EF gains (see Model 4).

Among observed play behaviors, social-dramatic play appears to be particularly powerful in predicting EF growth in this everyday context, highlighting the importance of both symbolic and social play processes. Although EF and pretense are likely bidirectionally connected (Carlson et al., 2014), the current study speaks to the importance of continued research on play-based interventions and corroborates a growing body of theoretical and empirical evidence for the importance of sociodramatic play in the development of EF.

Authors

• Rachel White, Hamilton College
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Thibodeau, University of Missouri
  Non-Presenting Author

• Francisco Palermo, University of Missouri
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ariana M. Mikulski, Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author