An Enactive Characterization of Pretend Play

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an empirical study of 32 adult dyads (i.e. groups of two people) engaged in pretend play. Our analysis indicates that participatory sense-making plays a key role in the success of pretend play sessions. We use the cognitive science theory of enaction as a theoretical lens to analyze the empirical data given its robust conceptual framework for describing participatory sensemaking. We present here five enactive characteristics of pretend play that appear to be necessary and sufficient for the emergence and maintenance of successful pretend play -mental preparation, meaning building, narrative enaction, narrative deepening, and flow maintenance. This enactive formalization is used to propose a computational model of pretend play that can be used to inform the design of an agent capable of playing in real time with human users.

Enactive Systems & Computing Mapping the terrain for Human-Computer Interaction research

“…Focusing the attention on the 13 papers related to the Human-Computer Interaction area, we can notice a bigger concentration in the latest 5 years, with a balanced distribution between journals and conferences (Table 7). Paper Journal Conference (Bordegoni & Cugini 2013) x (Bordegoni & Cugini 2009) x (Davis, Comerford, et al 2015) x (Davis, Hsiao, et al 2015) x (Flint & Turner 2015) x (Froese et al 2012) x (Kaipainen et al 2011) x (Luyat & Regia-Corte 2009) x (Pacheco & Souza-Concilio 2013) x (Pugliese & Lehtonen 2011) x (Saidali et al 2009) x (Todaro et al 2007) x (van der Linden et al 2011) x…”

Creative Sense-Making

“…We have seen evidence of how collaboration leads to dynamic and emergent meaning structures that inspire novel ideas during empirical studies of pretend play [7] and collaborative drawing [8]. We have also found how collaborators often provide unexpected ideas and thus lead to surprising results.…”

“…In creative interaction, meaning is continually shifting and evolving due to the participatory nature of improvisational collaboration [29]. However, empirical evidence [3,7] suggests that semi-stable (yet dynamic) meaning structures emerge to produce a steady state whereby both participants have a relatively robust predictive model that enables them to interact fluidly in a situated manner, without much explicit sense-making outside of fine-grained coordination. In our work, these stable units of meaning are referred to as nucleus activities that can grow through time as additional layers of meaning are added [7].…”

“…To collect the pretend play dataset, we conduct an observational study involving 32 pairs of adult players who were asked to perform two pretend play sessions for each pair of the participants on a large play-mat with toys and stuffed animals (c.f. [7] for a full description of the study).…”

Empirically Studying Participatory Sense-Making in Abstract Drawing with a Co-Creative Cognitive Agent

“…We employ the cognitive science theory of enaction [34] and its conceptual framework called participatory sensemaking [15] to model and understand creative collaboration. This framework describes critically important cognitive mechanisms and processes that we have seen evidence of in other collaboration tasks, such as joint activity and cooperation [7,13]. Participatory sense-making has been utilized to characterize collaboration and narrative development in pretend play [7], which is a similarly improvisational and open-ended domain.…”