Infant exuberant object play at home: Immense amounts of time-distributed, variable practice

Subset of data drawn from parent volume (https://nyu.databrary.org/volume/563) of 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, 23-month-old walking infants during natural activity in the home with caregivers. Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-hour home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N=40; 21 boys; 75% White). Regardless of age, for every infant and time scale, across 10,015 object bouts, object interactions were short (median=9.8s) and varied (transitions among dozens of toys and non-toys) but consumed most of infants’ time. We suggest that infant exuberant object play—immense amounts of brief, time-distributed, variable interactions with objects—may be conducive to learning object properties and functions, motor skill acquisition, and growth in cognitive, social and language domains.