Chapter 9: The Educational Importance Of Differentiating Exploration of Objects From Play With Objects in Childhood:

The ways that objects are used by children has been studied by scholars from a variety of fields in the social and behavioral sciences, such as anthropology (Bock, 2005), developmental psychology (Bjorklund & Gardiner, 2011), and zoology (Beck, 1980). Central to both early education and development, Piaget (1952, 1970) posited that children’s cognitive development was rooted in their sensorimotor interactions with objects where individuals construct representations for those objects and their associated actions through repeated interactions. These object-based representations, in turn, become less dependent upon children’s actions on objects as children are capable of manipulating the representations themselves, independently of the objects. From this view, it is not surprising that young children’s experience with objects has been given privileged status in the education of young children. However, much of what developmental psychologists and educators know about children’s object use, especially during infancy and early childhood, is often subsumed under the label “object play”: a label that is not based on empirical observation and one that has been used so loosely that it has very little consistent meaning across studies. Most commonly, object play is confounded with exploration of objects.