Emergent Structure in Children's Play Group Formation
William A. Griffin**, Willa Cree, M.S., Carol Martin, Ph.D., Richard Fabes,
Ph.D., Laura Hanish, Ph.D
In the fall of each year, new and returning children
between the ages of 3 and 6 are brought together in Arizona State University's
Child Development Lab where they eventually settle into pods of stable play
partners. Factors contributing to the formation of these play groups
are currently unknown but the dynamics of this evolution appear to have similar
characteristics as other structures in social organizations (e.g., agent
actions appear to be rule-based). This setting provides a natural laboratory
of studying emergent structure. Each year, the lab has a slightly different
social environment, this difference results primarily from the play group
formations, and in turn, play group formations are derived from the stability
of who plays with whom. These groupings and the structure they impose
on the lab evolve as the year progresses. The purpose of the paper
is to model this evolution. We examine the role of individual child
attributes on the emergent behavior. We use four child attributes derived
from behavioral observations: Physical attractiveness, Prosocial behavior,
Aggression, and Activity level. Using these attributes along with gender,
we simulate the propensity of a child, with a given set of attributes, to
play with any other given child. We include gender in the model because
strong gender typing in children of this age group appears to act as a primary
deterrent or facilitator in determining reinforcement by peers. We
illustrate the correspondence between simulated play clusters based on child
attribute vectors and actual data obtained at several fixed points throughout
the school year. Differences at each iteration provide information about
the possible strategies children may be using to select play partners.
In turn, we interpret these strategies and resign the simulation; by, for
example, differentially weighting attributes. Preliminary modeling
suggests that gender may mediate the effects of social attributes.