Sarah Gerson

I think within the field that's controversial, but I think it's closely related to empathy for sure.

So I think an important thing to caveat is that we use creative play on tablets as our kind of control or comparison case in this research.

We're not villainizing tablets in any way in this particular scope.

What we did is we were interested in whether there's a causal effect of doll play.

So when children are prompted to play with dolls and we give them some dolls to go home and play with for about a month,

do they then change their understanding about other people?

And is that changed relative to children who were sent home with tablets?

And so we wanted to know, do dolls improve children's understanding of other people's mental states?

And that's what we found here was that

four to eight year old, both girls and boys, when they were sent home with a set of dolls and told, play with these a few times a week, however you want to play.

Those children showed an increase in their understanding and kind of accuracy of understanding of other people's internal mental states relative to children who are playing tablet games.

So in this case, what we were using was a continuous measure of that theory of mind that we already talked about, where we basically give them kind of like prompts and have them guess what someone else thinks and how biased they are by what they think.

So it's hard to quantify in terms of how much did they understand, etc.

But what we saw was statistically significant.

So we saw that children improved significantly.

significantly when they played with dolls, but not when they played with tablets.

But we also interestingly saw that there were individual differences within those children who brought those dolls home.

So children who had parent reported peer problems.

So this is reporting about things like my child doesn't have many close friends.

My child prefers to play alone.