ArticleOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science2023
Not Playing by the Rules: Exploratory Play, Rational Action, and Efficient Search.
Article in Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pedagogy Does Not Necessarily Constrain Exploration: Investigating Preschoolers' Information Search During Instructed Exploration.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Active inference goes to school: the importance of active learning in the age of large language models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Actively Learning to Learn Causal Relationships.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Order and change in art: towards an active inference account of aesthetic experience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- "The Red Spots Are Now Lava, We Shouldn't Step on Them"-The Joint Creation of Novel Arbitrary Social Contexts in Pretend Play.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2023Article
- The Child as Hacker.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2020Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent studies suggest children's exploratory play is consistent with formal accounts of rational learning. Here we focus on the tension between this view and a nearly ubiquitous feature of human play: In play, people subvert normal utility functions, incurring seemingly unnecessary costs to achieve arbitrary rewards. We show that four-and-five-year-old children not only infer playful behavior from observed violations of rational action (Experiment 1), but themselves take on unnecessary costs during both retrieval (Experiment 2) and search (Experiments 3A-B) tasks, despite acting efficiently in non-playful, instrumental contexts. We discuss the value of such apparently utility-violating behavior and why it might serve learning in the long run.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.