2-054 - Keeping an Eye on Pretend Play in Child Development: Current Advances in Understanding, Assessment, and Intervention Techniques

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The four presentations in this symposium address the current state of cutting edge research, assessment, and intervention techniques being used to better understand how social cognitive domains, such as imagination and affective processes in pretend play, differ in children with typical and atypical developmental trajectories. Major aims relate to delineating what domains play impacts during development and how play itself can be used as a diagnostic tool for specific developmental disorders or in building important skill sets. Specifically, two presentations will report on how pretend play relates to cognitive and language abilities in preschool children and how affect expressed in play prospectively predicts prosocial and aggressive behaviors during child development. A third presentation will describe a novel and brief measure of play that shows promise in being used as a screener in diagnosing ASD, ADHD, and specific language impairments. Lastly, a final presentation will report on extending the limits of current play-based intervention protocols by discussing the feasibility of using telehealth to deliver intervention to children with Prader-Willi Syndrome. Collectively, these abstracts highlight the benefits of turning our focus back on pretend play in early childhood development, across home, school, and healthcare settings. Pretend play is not only an important skill set for developing children, which impacts multiple areas of development, but it is also a modality through which various other skills can be built and child development can be better understood.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Sandra Russ, Case Western Reserve University

Individual Presentations

• Developmental considerations for preschoolers’ pretend play: Play stability over one month and relationships with IQ and language - Presenting Author: Karla K. Fehr, Southern Illinois University

• Prospective Relations of Affect in Preschoolers’ Solitary Play and Children’s Prosocial and Aggressive Behaviors across Contexts - Presenting Author: Ana K. Marcelo, Clark University; Tuppett Marie Yates, University of California, Riverside

• The Utility of Play for Understanding Developmental Differences in Preschoolers diagnosed with ADHD, SLI, or ASD - Presenting Author: Laura E Hlavaty, Case Western Reserve University; Elizabeth J Short, Case Western Reserve University; Susan I Gross, Case Western Reserve University; Rachael D Cooper, Case Western Reserve University; Maia M Noeder, DuPont Hospital for Children

• Evaluating the Feasibility of a Play-based Telehealth Intervention Program for Children with Prader-Willi Syndrome - Anastasia Dimitropoulos, Case Western Reserve University; Presenting Author: Olena Zyga, Case Western Reserve University; Sandra Russ, Case Western Reserve University