Finds that (1) playfulness is a trait related to divergent, creative thinking; (2) allowing young children to play with objects can lead to increased performance on problem solving and divergent thinking tasks involving the same or similar objects; and (3) play training leads to short term gains in young children's cognitive performance.…

Explores the relations among combinatorial capacities in language, symbolic play, blockbuilding, and nonsemantic action sequences within a sample of 18- to 24-month-old children, as well as assessing the developmental level of a selected subset of concepts. (HOD)