Towards a neuroscientific understanding of play: A neuropsychological coding framework for analysing infant-adult play patterns

During early life, play is a ubiquitous activity, and an individual’s propensity for play is positively related to cognitive development and emotional well-being. Play behaviour is diverse and multi-faceted. A challenge for current research is to converge on a common definition and measurement system for play ‒ whether examined at a behavioural, cognitive or neurological level. Combining these different approaches in a multi-level analysis could yield significant advances in understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms of play, and provide the basis for developing biologically-grounded play models. However, there is currently no integrated framework for conducting a multi-level analysis of play that spans brain, cognition and behaviour. The proposed neuropsychological coding framework uses grounded and observable behaviours along three neuropsychological dimensions (sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional), to compute inferences about playful behaviour and related social interactional states. Here, we illustrate the sensitivity and utility of the proposed coding framework using two contrasting dyadic corpora (N=5) of mother-infant object-oriented interactions during experimental conditions that were either conducive (Condition 1) or non-conducive (Condition 2) to the emergence of playful behaviour. We find that the framework accurately identifies the modal form of social interaction as being either playful (Condition 1) or non-playful (Condition 2), and further provides useful insights about differences in the quality of social interaction and temporal synchronicity within the dyad. In conclusion, here, we present a novel neuropsychological framework for analysing the continuous time-evolution of adult-infant play patterns, underpinned by biologically informed state coding along sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions. We expect that the proposed framework will have wide utility amongst researchers wishing to employ an integrated, multi-level approach to the study of play, and lead towards a greater understanding of the neuroscientific basis of play and may yield insights into a new biologically-grounded taxonomy of play interactions.