ReviewEvolutionary human sciences2021
Children and innovation: play, play objects and object play in cultural evolution.
Review in Evolutionary human sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Atypical tool and object use in wild immature chimpanzees reveals developmental pathways to innovation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Play Behavior Varies with Age, Sex, and Socioecological Context in Wild, Immature Orangutans (International journal of primatology · 2024Article
- Children at play: The role of novices in the production of Europe's earliest Upper Paleolithic ceramics.PloS one · 2024Article
- Atlatl use equalizes female and male projectile weapon velocity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Preschool Children's Loose Parts Play and the Relationship to Cognitive Development: A Review of the Literature.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Owl-like plaques of the Copper Age and the involvement of children.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Robert C. Dunnell'sEvolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Children's Evolved Learning Abilities and Their Implications for Education.Educational psychology review · 2022Article
- Veiled agency? Children, innovation and the archaeological record.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Observational Learning and Generalization in Infant Grasps of Novel Tools.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cultural evolutionary theory conceptualises culture as an information-transmission system whose dynamics take on evolutionary properties. Within this framework, however, innovation has been likened to random mutations, reducing its occurrence to chance or fortuitous transmission error. In introducing the special collection on children and innovation, we here place object play and play objects - especially functional miniatures - from carefully chosen archaeological contexts in a niche construction perspective. Given that play, including object play, is ubiquitous in human societies, we suggest that plaything construction, provisioning and use have, over evolutionary timescales, paid substantial selective dividends via ontogenetic niche modification. Combining findings from cognitive science, ethology and ethnography with insights into hominin early developmental life-history, we show how play objects and object play probably had decisive roles in the emergence of innovative capabilities. Importantly, we argue that closer attention to play objects can go some way towards addressing changes in innovation rates that occurred throughout human biocultural evolution and why innovations are observable within certain technological domains but not others.
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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.