About The Study

TEDDY is a project on play and executive functions in toddlerhood, specifically how children’s play can support their development of executive functions and how play can be used as a measure of toddler’s emergent executive functions.

What are executive functions?

Executive functions are cognitive skills that allow us to plan and control our thoughts, emotions, and behaviour (Diamond, 2013). Executive functions are supported by a neural network in the brain that is largely located within the frontal lobes, (the front part of our brain) and parietal lobe (top of our brain). However, other brain regions are also involved in most executive functions. In line with the maturation of underlying fronto-parietal networks executive functions start to emerge in late infancy and toddlerhood but are important throughout life. Being able to resist looking at the newest notification on our phone while working, for example, requires similar executive functions children muster when they must wait to start eating until everybody’s plate is filled.

The development of executive functions is an important milestone in a child’s development. In fact, children’s emergent executive functions are a predictor of their overall developmental success, ranging from social competence to emotional and behavioural regulation (Stucke & Doebel, 2024). Because executive functions are so important throughout life, researchers have done a lot of work exploring ways to improve them early in childhood (Diamond, 2016). Recently, one approach that’s becoming more and more popular is play.

What do we mean by play?

Play is a nearly universal activity of all children (and also adults!). Play encompasses a broad range of activities and can include sports, board games, or the arts. Generally, play means fun, enjoyment, and distraction – yet it is difficult to precisely define what play is. This is why the TEDDY study is specifically focused on pretend play, a type of play that is marked by imagination, creativity and playfulness. Children engage in pretend play when they are engaged in an as-if reality. For example, when they act as if they were a dinosaur, or as if their teddy bear can talk.

Pretend play can be a lot of fun for children. They can create their own stories, take on unusual roles, and engage with their parents or peers collaboratively. It also allows children to integrate their everyday experiences into play to make sense of their lives. Children putting on a stethoscope and pretending to be a doctor, for example, can explore potentially intimidating or scary environments, such as a hospital. Consequently, children’s pretend play is linked to various beneficial outcomes for children and is used in education and therapy (Lillard et al., 2013).

Children first engage in pretend play when they enter toddlerhood (Thompson & Goldstein, 2022), roughly around the same time as executive functions begin to formalise. In fact, pretend play requires many executive functions:

• Working Memory – Holding specific pretend storylines and rules in mind.

• Cognitive Flexibility – Switching between the as-if reality and actual reality.

• Planning – Mapping out elaborate play scenarios

• Inhibitory Control – Creating distance between one’s self and a pretend role.

Accordingly, pretend play is full of cognitive challenges that are engaging and exciting and as such great opportunities for development. A previous study (White & Carlson, 2016), for example, has shown that children who are engaged in a play scenario where they take on the role of a superhero can focus longer on a challenging cognitive task than children who are not playing. This has been called the Batman Effect. 

Want to find out more?

The TEDDY project is ongoing. We will be updating this page as we go along and are excited to share results as soon as we have them available! If you want to find out more in the meantime, please reach out to us. We also have prepared a brief list of resources that delve deeper into the topics of the TEDDY project.

• Tuite (2024) – A Day for Play

2024 was the first year with a dedicated, international day of play. On this day, Kathleen Tuite, from the Early Childhood Ireland Network published a blog post summarizing what we know about play and its various benefits to development. Read it here.

• White & Carlson (2021) - Pretending with realistic and fantastical stories facilitates executive function in 3-year-old children (Link)

This is an experimental study that showed how engaging in pretend play improves children’s performance on a task of executive functions. There is a great blog post that summarizes the main results of this study here.

• Coulson (2021) – The Batman Effect

The Batman Effect describes childrens’ enhanced cognitive performance when they are in pretend play, for example pretending to be Batman. It has been replicated in multiple studies. One is described in a blog post - linked here.

• Carlson (2017) - How do I Foster My Child's Executive Function Skills?

Stephanie Carlson is one of the leading researchers in this field and has published important studies on executive functions and play. In this video she shares some insights on how parents can support their child’s executive functions development. Watch it here.

• Doebel (2018) - How your brain's executive function works

Sabine Doebel has done a lot of research on executive functions both in children and adults. In this TED talk she describes executive functions and their importance in our daily lives. Watch it here.

References:

Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135-168. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750  

Diamond, A. (2016). Why improving and assessing executive functions early in life is critical. In J. A. Griffin, L. S. Freund, & P. McCardle (Eds.), Executive function in preschool-age children: Integrating measurement, neurodevelopment, and translational research (pp. 11-43). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/14797-002 

​​Lillard, A. S., Lerner, M. D., Hopkins, E. J., Dore, R. A., Smith, E. D., & Palmquist, C. M. (2013). The impact of pretend play on children's development: A review of the evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 1-34. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029321  

Stucke, N. J., & Doebel, S. (2023). Does preschool executive function predict concurrent and later social, health, and behavioral outcomes? A meta-analysis. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/s59ev  

Thompson, B. N., & Goldstein, T. R. (2022). Observing the developmental progression of pretend play across the preschool years. Journal of Cognition and Development, 23(4), 482-502. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2022.2058508

White, R. E., & Carlson, S. M. (2016). What would Batman do? Self-distancing improves executive function in young children. Developmental Science, 19(3), 419-426. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12314