Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Journals
  3. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  4. Volume 5
Journal Home
Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Publication date:

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×
< Back to all volumes

Volume 5 - December 1982

Contents

Page 17 of 20

Author's Response

Open Peer Commentary

Target Article

  • Does play matter? Functional and evolutionary aspects of animal and human play

  • Peter K. Smith
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 February 2010, pp. 139-155

  • In this paper I suggest that play is a distinctive behavioural category whose adaptive significance calls for explanation. Play primarily affords juveniles practice toward the exercise of later skills. Its benefits exceed its costs when sufficient practice would otherwise be unlikely or unsafe, as is particularly true with physical skills and socially competitive ones. Manipulative play with objects is a byproduct of increased intelligence, specifically selected for only in a few advanced primates, notably the chimpanzee.

    The adaptiveness of play in pongid evolution is traced through the probable changes in selective pressures that occurred in hominid evolution. It is argued that fantasy was an emergent property in hominids, made possible by symbolic intelligence and language, and serving to make play complex enough to continue to provide useful practice for increasingly complex later skills.

    The advent of organised instruction and education has meant that play's unplanned, intrinisic goal-setting could be replaced by extrinsic goal-setting in the systematic development of particular skills. However, the need to ensure adequate motivation has continued to give play educational value. In addition, its capacity to enhance innovative behaviour seems to be a residual function of play which has acquired a new cultural importance.

Open Peer Commentary

Continuing Commentary

Author's Response

Open Peer Commentary

Front matter

  • BBS volume 5 issue 3 Cover and Front matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 February 2010, pp. f1-f2
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Author's Response

Open Peer Commentary

Continuing Commentary

Open Peer Commentary

Back matter

  • BBS volume 5 issue 3 Cover and Back matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 February 2010, pp. b1-b8
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Open Peer Commentary

Continuing Commentary

Open Peer Commentary

Page 17 of 20