Dave Neale

University of Cambridge | Cam · Faculty of Education

While mother–infant affect synchrony has been proposed to facilitate the early development of social understanding, most investigations into affect synchrony have concentrated more on negative than positive affect. We analysed affect sharing during parent–infant object play, comparing positive and negative affect, to examine how it is modulated by...

This is a collaborative tribute to Dr David Whitebread. In remembrance of his stellar career as an research, educator, supervisor and play advocate.

Play for adults is thriving. Adults are playing more often and in more diverse ways than at any time in recent history – perhaps than in all history. But what is it doing for us?

This commentary provides a brief review of the history, theoretical significance, and application to early childhood education of research on metacognition in early childhood. It particularly focuses on the issue of whether metacognition in early childhood needs to be explicit, conscious, and available to be articulated or whether it can be implici...

There is evidence that parents could influence the development of their children’s effortful control in infancy through social interaction. Playful interactions in infancy often involve scaffolding - i.e. the parental provision of support and modelling for problem solving and learning during play. However, previous research has found little consist...

Social learning allows infants to learn vicariously by observing adult behaviour, but how the infant brain accomplishes this feat remains unknown. Here, electroencephalography (EEG) signals were simultaneously measured from forty-seven mothers and infants (10.7 months) during a live social learning task. First, infants observed mothers demonstrate...

This qualitative study explored the interactions of six triads of Year One students in the United Kingdom (n = 18; mean age = 5 years, 7 months; 9 female) investigating interpersonal regulation of learning, social dynamics, and group dialogue, evident in instances of productive collaboration during problem‐solving activities. Group activity was cap...

Defining play has plagued researchers and philosophers for years. From describing play as an inaccessible concept due to its complexity, to providing checklists of features, the field has struggled with how to conceptualize and operationalize “play.” This theoretical piece reviews the literature about both play and learning and suggests that by vie...

Important developments in executive function are thought to occur during the second year of life, but few tools exist to assess executive function in this period. We argue that, to be effective, tasks for this age range need to reduce the abstract nature of the task rules and reduce reliance on verbal instruction. We present the Grasping Task, whic...

Play during early life is a ubiquitous activity, and an individual’s propensity for play is positively related to cognitive development and emotional well-being. Play behavior (which may be solitary or shared with a social partner) is diverse and multi-faceted. A challenge for current research is to converge on a common definition and measurement s...

Play during early life is a ubiquitous activity, and an individual’s propensity for play is positively related to cognitive development and emotional well-being. Play behaviour (which may be solitary or shared with a social partner) is diverse and multi-faceted. A challenge for current research is to converge on a common definition and measurement...

This white paper looks at the most recent research on the role and importance of play for children’s life and learning. It concludes that the evidence on learning through play is mounting, that engaging with the world in playful ways is essential for a child and lays a foundation for learning, especially in the early years of life. Beyond infancy a...

There is a substantial body of research, across a number of disciplines, arguing for the importance of play in human development, and, in some cases, proposing intriguing potential mechanisms that might explain the role of play in children’s cognitive, emotional and social learning. In this white paper, we review this evidence in relation to specif...

Neuroscience helps explain how playful experiences can support learning. In this white paper, we find that each characteristic – joy, meaning, active engagement, iteration, and social interaction – is associated with brain processes involved in learning. These processes include reward, memory, cognitive flexibility, and stress regulation that are a...

During early life, play is a ubiquitous activity, and an individual's propensity for play is positively related to cognitive development and emotional well-being. Play behaviour is diverse and multi-faceted. A challenge for current research is to converge on a common definition and measurement system for play - whether examined at a behavioural, co...

The importance of parent–child reminiscing for young children’s social and cognitive development has been well established, but despite the increasing numbers of children attending formal early childhood settings such as nurseries and preschools, there has been surprisingly little research exploring educator–child reminiscing in these contexts. Fur...

This POSTnote focuses on trends in UK compulsory education and outlines where trends differ between individual nations. Five trends can be identified in compulsory education across the UK: changes in the attainment gap between different pupil groups, rising pupil numbers, decreasing numbers of people entering initial teacher training, the growing u...

Recently, Stephen Gorard has outlined strong objections to the use of significance testing in social research. He has argued, first, that as the samples used in social research are almost always non-random it is not possible to use inferential statistical techniques and, second, that even if a truly random sample were achieved, the logic behind the...