Europe’s Journal of Psychology

Materiality and Cognitive Development: Contemporary Debates and Empirical Studies in Early Childhood

Nicolás Alessandroni — 2024-05-29

An Ecological Approach to Conceptual Thinking in Material Engagement

Nicolás Alessandroni — 2024-05-29

Although post-cognitivist approaches have shaken the status quo by emphasising the dynamic interactions among the brain, the body, and the environment in cognition, mainstream psychological theories continue to view concepts as primarily representational or skull-bound mental phenomena. As a result, the dynamics of action and the possible impact of material culture on conceptual thinking are poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the process and meaning of conceptual thinking from a material engagement perspective. We argue that conceptual thinking is not a matter of forming representations in the head but something we do—a way of engaging with materiality. Conceptual thinking is conceptual thinging, namely a kind of unmediated practical knowledge that individuals put into play when they engage, in a general way, with and through the world. In this sense, we propose that conceptual thinking is instantiated in the dynamic coordination of bodily practices and artefacts in sociomaterial activities. To elucidate this perspective, we introduce seven principles defining conceptual thinking within an ecological-enactive framework of cognition.

Babies in the Corporeal Turn: The Cognitive Embodiment of Early Motor Development and Exploration in the Brazilian Context of Early Childhood Education

Natália Meireles Santos da Costa — 2024-05-29

The corporeal turn in developmental psychology has rekindled interest regarding how early motor development contributes to and enhances cognitive development across the first years of life. By highlighting embodied perceptual-motor engagement with the world, embodied cognitive learning emphasizes the importance of experience and perceptual-motor mechanisms in modulating the development of person-environment systems. The field currently calls for research that combines such conceptual frameworks with the complex everyday material and sociocultural landscapes that resource infants' developmental trajectories. We, therefore, aim to connect the conceptual refinement of bodily-anchored exploration to the contextual reality of everyday settings of early childhood education (ECE)—here situated in the Brazilian context—as relevant social and cultural suppliers and modulators of the developmental trajectories of babies. Secondarily, we ponder on the premises of national pedagogical curricula and their role in mediating the quality of experiences and systems of person-environment relations more closely. Cultural-historical psychology, in dialogue with the principles of Ecological Psychology, constitutes the theoretical framework that underpins the microgenetic analyses conducted. By analyzing episodes of exploratory actions of a focal baby situated in the ECE context, we seek to apprehend motor-perceptual indicators of embodied cognitive processing by considering the modes of appropriation entailed in episodes of embodied exploration. We reflect on pedagogical implications considering official national documents of early childhood education. This work contributes by providing complementary insights into the nature of infants' everyday sociocultural embodied experiences and their development in pedagogically oriented settings.

Shared Construction of Social Pretend Play Sequences at the Kindergarten

Valentina Fantasia — 2024-05-29

Pretend play is usually defined as an activity wherein objects and actions (but also affective expression, at times) are separated from their original meanings. Its developmental appearance is set around the second year of life, and increases dramatically in duration, frequency and quality when play episodes start becoming more complex, both linguistically and interactionally reaching its peak in preschool years. To date, however, little attention has been paid to how social pretend play emerges and develops before the age of three. Our study aims to investigate early spontaneous pretend play interactions between children aged 19 to 28 months attending the same kindergarten. We used micro-analytical coding of video-recorded interactions to explore sequences of interaction where children coordinated their actions to engage in social pretend play with objects. Our analyses showed that co-constructed sequences appeared organised by a turn-alternation structure already at 19 months, and children used embodied and material resources afforded by the sequential organisation of actions to dynamically manage their participation. Although explorative, our results seem in line with previous reports suggesting an early onset of social pretend play developing over a continuum from being predominately an individual activity to progressively becoming a co-constructed endeavour.

Gestures, Objects, and Spaces: Exploring Teachers’ Multimodal Communication in Nursery Schools

Ana Moreno-Núñez — 2024-05-29

This study builds on the increasing evidence that the multimodal nature of adult-child interactions and the use of objects play an important role in early linguistic development. Most of these studies analyzed dyadic interactions at home, whereas few research has been conducted in early childhood education and care settings. In this paper, we characterized the multimodal nature of teachers’ communicative bids during classroom-based group interactions in nursery schools. Observational data of circle-time activities was collected from 16 Spanish nursery school classrooms, comprising 16 teachers and 161 children between two and three years of age. We analyzed teachers’ communicative bids (i.e., verbal utterances and verbal-gestural bids) considering the frequency of use of different types of gestures, to whom are they addressed (i.e., the whole group or a single child), the extent to which they involve the use of objects, the classroom layout, and the relationship between the communicative bids and the number of children that participated in each classroom. Teachers’ communication with toddlers is highly multimodal and rely on different types of gestures, although the use of objects in our sample was scarce. Descriptive analysis suggest that certain classroom layouts may favor teachers’ use of some types of gestures over others. In this article, we discuss the implications of both the use of objects and space for understanding how adults shape the linguistic contexts of young children, and the potential opportunities and limitations they pose for classroom interactions.

Material Engagement Shaping Participation of Children on the Autism Spectrum: Embodiment and Subjectivity in Small-Group Learning

Juliene Madureira Ferreira — 2024-05-29

This study investigated the material engagement and their affordances for participation of children on the autism spectrum (AS) in small-group learning. Framed by a methodology called Idea Diary that fosters social interactions in classroom environments, our focus was on understanding how and when the construction and manipulation of the diary supported children’s participation and knowledge construction in small groups. This investigation was guided by the intersection of the theory of subjectivity developed by Fernando González Rey and enactive accounts of cognition. This framework provided the view of the singularity in the communicative process of children on the AS and the necessary support for examining the mechanisms of engagement that led to children’s participation. We present two case studies of 9–10-year-old boys. Data consists of the diaries produced and used by children and video recordings of children’s interactions during small-group discussions. Our analytical approach included a qualitative semiotic analysis of the materials and a micro-analysis of the social interactions. The results showed, first, that children on the AS continuously engaged in the construction of the diary, expressing elements of their subjectivity—experiences, ideas and the system through which they interact with the world. Repetition framed children’s productions and signalled engagement. Second, material engagement enabled participatory sense-making, which in this study appeared in creating new communicative resources between the child on the AS and their peers and in adapting the narratives, approximating children’s perspectives in conversations. Although contextualised within a specific pedagogical practice, the study contributes to advancing our understanding of the role of material engagement in social participation in learning situations involving children on the AS, particularly relevant in educational psychology and education.