Play & Learning Across a Year (PLAY)

NIH R01HD094830
Administered in: Liberal Arts

Abstract:

Piaget, Montessori, and Bruner observed that play is the work of infants. The PLAY (Play & Learning Across a Year) project seeks to catalyze discovery about the form and dynamics of this essential work across a critical period from 12 to 24 months of age when infants show remarkable advances in language, object interaction, locomotion, and emotion regulation. PLAY will leverage the joint expertise of 65 “launch group” researchers, including 5 at Penn State, and capitalize on the Databrary video-sharing library and Datavyu video-coding tool to exploit the power of video to reveal the richness and complexity of behavior. PLAY researchers will collect, transcribe, code, share, and exploit a video corpus of infant and mother naturalistic activity in the home to test hypotheses about behavioral, developmental, and environmental cascades.  In turn, the project will demonstrate the value and feasibility of a cross-domain synergistic approach to infant research while advancing new ways to use video as data and documentation to facilitate discovery and ensure transparency.