This is my second post in the Play: Today blog series, where I’m thinking about what the surging popularity of “tech toys” means for children’s imagination and creativity. Are toys like the LeapFrog Clickstart and Fisher-Price Launchpad, things that are basically pint-sized versions of adult consumer electronics, doing less for children’s cognitive development than more traditional toys like blocks and Legos?

Today I’m going to approach this question by stepping back and asking a slightly broader one, namely: where did this tech toy craze came from in the first place? What’s really behind the toy industry’s rush towards computerized, electronic gadgets? One possibility, the one that I suspect the toy industry itself would like parents to believe, is that kids today are just “different from the way we were” (as a Mom quoted in the Times story put it). The sub-text here seems to be that because today’s kids are being raised in a more wired world, they need more sophisticated, “grown-up” toys to keep them happy and cognitively engaged.

I don’t think that’s the case at all. For my part, I think it’s more accurate to say that the popularity of tech toys is just a new face on a familiar truth: namely that children are predisposed to find imitating adults highly engaging and rewarding. Modern kids are imitative creatures immersed in a world where adults are constantly tapping at keyboards and talking on cell phones, so its quite natural that they wind up wanting to do these same things. It’s not at all different from what children in countless prior generations have done, nor is it inherently less healthy simply because the objects that are now the targets of this imitative propensity are electronic gizmos. The desire to imitate is actually extremely healthy — it’s one of kids’ most powerful tools for learning. The thing that can be unhealthy, however, is the way we as adults respond to children’s imitative wishes.

There was a delightful reader comment in the Times article that I think captures this incredibly well. A reader named Greg from New York said simply:

“My son would also prefer using the real lawn mower to the toy one has. That doesn’t mean I let him.”

I think Greg is right on here. The toy and electronics industries would both like parents to believe that there is something special about children’s wish to imitate the use of things like cell phones or laptops — that depriving them of the “genuine article” in these cases is tantamount to standing in the way of their education. For example, the Times article quotes the chief executive of Kajeet, a cell phone maker that is now marketing a phone for children ages 8 and up, as saying:

“When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness they’re much less interested. They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they’re smart enough to use it better than you do.”

My response to this is: so what? When I was a kid I loved to pretend that I was a “big helper” (as I called them when I was little) — someone who got to wear a really cool official uniform like a fireman or a policeman. And it goes without saying that when my Mom found a real police uniform at a second hand store, I absolutely adored wearing it. As soon as it appeared in the dress-up box, I couldn’t have cared less about the “pretend” kid-sized uniforms that had preceded it. If one of the fundamental social desires underlying imitation is kid’s wish to “be just like” an adult, then of course a real uniform (or cell phone or laptop) is infinitely preferable to one that is clearly just a pretend stand-in.

But just as my Mom didn’t sign me up for the police academy because I loved the real uniform, there’s no necessity to give kids real techie gadgets just because they’d prefer them. I think that in many cases doing so actually subverts what kids imitative desire is really all about. No matter what the CEO of Kajeet says, eight year olds don’t really want to be making business calls on their cell phones during snack time. They want to play, to pretend, and too imagine–all things that a real cell phone, laptop, or iPod makes harder, not easier.

In my next post I’m going to come back to this theme by examining more closely what play is really all about — and what kinds of toys are thus the best for facilitating it. There will be a short hiatus before that post appears, as I’ll be traveling this week to head home for the holidays. You can look for a minor update around Wednesday (one that will hopefully get some discussion going around these themes), to be followed by a more substantive bit of writing this weekend.

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• Are High Tech Toys Bad for Children’s Imagination? (3)

With Hello Felix now off the ground and my overimitation research in print, I’ve been spending some time doing a bit of catching up on reading. Among the things in the backlog was a really excellent article that recently appeared in the New York Times about kids and high tech toys. The article opens with what I found to be a surprising fact, namely that the majority of the gifts on Amazon.com’s “hot list” for young children this year bear a greater resemblance to adult cell phones or PDAs than they do to… well, toys. Tickle Me Elmo and his ilk seem to be taking a back seat this year to kid gizmos that look like they should be able to hot sync with your Blackberry.

Not that I normally have cause to doubt the Times fact checkers, but this got me sufficiently curious that I decided to do a bit of informal investigating myself. Naturally the Times story is accurate – the remarkable thing though is that, if anything, it seems to under-report the trend. As of today, 4 out of 12 of the most popular gifts on Amazon for 2- to 4-year-old children were high tech gadgets. This means that a lot of kids who were just barely walking last holiday season are going to be spending the New Year surfing the web with LeapFrog’s ClickStart My First Computer, pedaling furiously on Fisher-Price’s Smart Cycle (a tiny exercise bike connected to a video game), or doing some social networking with the latest member of the Webkinz family (a reindeer, naturally).

All of this is a bit surprising, certainly, but is it bad? It’s a tricky question. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically bad or harmful about techie toys; there’s no reason that toys with screens or keypads should necessarily be less fortifying for a child’s mind and imagination than blocks or Legos. And these kinds of toys do serve a very useful function that more traditional toys don’t, namely giving kids a head-start with the kind of abstract symbolic manipulation and information processing that are a part of life in the wired world.

At the same time, however, I also think its hard to dispute that the rising popularity of high tech kid gizmos is a trend that runs afoul of some very real problems, not the least of which is childhood obesity. (This criticism does not apply, of course, to the previously mentioned Fisher-Price Smart Cycle, a toy that would probably allow three-year-olds to significantly reduce our fossil fuel dependency if the power of all those tiny pedal strokes could be collectively harnessed). The term that the toy industry uses as shorthand for the tech trend should also give parent’s pause. According to the Times, toy makers call it “Kids Getting Older Younger.” I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.

All of this has inspired me to kick off a multi-part blog series that I’m going to dub Play: Today. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be using this space to think about these issues, and what impact high tech toys really have on kids imagination and learning. If you’re interested in following along you might take a minute to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. I’ll be adding new posts to the series in regular succession, and the newsfeed is a great way to tell at a glance when new content has been added. Not RSS inclined? You can check back for the next Play: Today post on Monday.

(The New York Times article on tech toys is available here)

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• Does Your Child Get to Use the Lawnmower? (0)

This post was inspired by a really great question that a blog reader named Susan posted on the Felix Forum this morning. She pointed out that though it’s easy to talk about overimitation as a humorous quirk of children’s learning, it’s not really clear that we as adults are immune to the same kinds of errors. I couldn’t agree more: when it comes to the seemingly “obvious” mistakes that overimitation can introduce, adults definitely don’t have the last laugh.

It’s funny (if not altogether shocking), but the anecdotal evidence on this point seems to come primarily from situations in which adults are interacting with computers. Actually, there was a blog post to exactly this effect just a day or two ago from an IT professional named Anders Aspnas in Finland. On his Efficiency Limit blog, Aspnas comments that:

“I guess [overimitation] occurs a lot in IT… Part of what is done has no real relevance to the problem at hand. The procedures just happen that way as a result of accidents being replicated… just because someone happened to originally do it that way. Somebody may finally realize that some parts of procedures are not bringing any value and improve, but that seems to take ages.”

My own experience definitely mirrors what Aspnas is pointing out. In the process of converting my parents to using Macs, for example, I’ve had many instances of noticing odd idiosyncracies in the procedures that they’ve learned, many of which turn out to be attributable to some incidental thing that I did in the process of demonstrating for them. Blog reader Susan makes a similar comment here, about how her mother “overimitated” the ritual of closing all the windows open on the desktop before launching a web browser. Having seen Susan herself do it, she was convinced that Firefox just couldn’t get off the ground any other way.

In all honesty though, this phenomenon really isn’t limited to novice users. I may have degrees in computer science and AI from Oxford and MIT, but I’ve definitely still done my fair share of computer-related overimitation. On the left is an example screen capture taken from some of the development tools we used at MIT. Click on the thumbnail for a larger view, then look at the last checkbox down toward the bottom – the one that says “invoke real build tools instead of faking them.”

What on earth does that mean? I haven’t the faintest idea.

I can tell you though that if I’d seen a more senior and experienced team member check that box in the course of debugging a project, forever after I’d have made certain that it was checked whenever I had to troubleshoot something myself. I did this kind of “overimitating” constantly at MIT, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish nearly as much while I was there if I hadn’t. Using other’s knowledge as a catalyst for your own learning (even when we don’t fully understand the details) isn’t just a good strategy, in my opinion -it’s an important aspect of human nature. When we need to extend our own understanding, the knowledge of others is often the first resource that we call on.

What do you think? Do examples like this count as overimitation in the same way that children inefficiently opening the Puzzle Objects does? Please do take a moment to comment! You can do so right here on the blog through the “Comments” link below, or on the new Felix Forum area of the site.

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Yesterday proved to be an exciting milestone for me, as the first portion of my overimitation research was officially published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s been a long time coming, and I’d really like to thank my co-authors and friends Andrew Young (now in his first year of the PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Professor Frank Keil for sharing all the hard work that helped to make it happen. I’d also like to thank Frank for graciously footing the additional cost of publishing the article as an “open access” submission. This means that anyone, anywhere can download the complete article from the PNAS website, without the need for a (very expensive) subscription. You can also check out the extensive online supporting information that we submitted to supplement the print article, including some really great video footage of children participating in the experiment. The videos are quite entertaining if I do say so myself, and they really help to convey what overimitation is in a way that’s hard to do in just words, so be sure to check them out.

You can access the PNAS article right here.

Also, if you’ve been reading this blog but haven’t yet ventured over to see the rest of the site, I hope you’ll take an opportunity to do so now. I’ve been working overtime to get the site up and running in time for the article’s release, and it’s been really fun to see the first wave of visitors rolling in as the overimitation story percolates its way across the internet. One of the real highlights so far has been having the story picked up by Carl Zimmer, the prominent science journalist and frequent contributor to the New York Times, among other places. I had the pleasure of meeting Carl for the first time about two years ago, when we wrote an article for the Times on the start of my research. It’s been fun then for me to see things come full-circle with his latest blog post about this work. You can read Carl’s comments on overimitation at his science blog, The Loom.

Returning to thinking about this site, as I’ve discussed in a few other contexts, my vision for Hello Felix is to create a trustworthy, authoritative source of news and information for anyone interested in learning more about the science of childhood development and learning – especially parents. Cognitive scientists are doing so much fascinating work on how kids think, I hope that this site will help to increase the level of interchange between the people who study kids in the research lab and the people who, well, raise them. It’s an exchange that would be a real benefit for everyone involved, I know, and a lot of fun at that. So please check it out!

Over time the site will be expanding to cover lots more topics and varieties of developmental psychology research, but as a starting point I’ve put together a nice guided tour of overimitation and imitative learning that I hope people will find useful.

As always, I’d love to hear any comments or feedback you might want to provide. Please feel free to comment on articles on the site (look for the links at the bottom of each page), or to send me an email directly. Also, I’m also pleased to say that the brand new Felix Forum is now up and running! I hope you’ll stop by to see what people are discussing, or better yet to start a discussion of your own. I’m online posting and answering questions each day, so all new user submissions are sure to get a quick response!

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