Musicalidad y juego en la primera infancia: el andamiaje que el juego con las formas de la vitalidad provee al juego de ficción

Abstract

El juego de ficción, aquel que comporta la creación de una situación imaginaria, ha sido un objeto de estudio privilegiado en la psicología del desarrollo y se ha señalado su rol en el desarrollo de funciones psicológicas complejas. Recientemente, gracias a la utilización de herramientas de análisis de las artes temporales, se ha documentado una nueva forma de juego, el juego con las formas de la vitalidad, cuyo foco es la repetición y variación de motivos sonoro-kinéticos de modo interactivo, en detrimento de cualquier contenido figurativo. Se ha observado que durante el tercer año de vida este tipo de juego se presenta de modo combinado con el juego de ficción y que en esos casos podría ser parte del andamiaje del desarrollo del juego de ficción. El objetivo del presente estudio fue realizar un microanálisis de los sonidos y movimientos de una escena de juego de ficción combinado con juego con las formas de la vitalidad de una niña de1año y 11 meses de edad, con el fin de conocer cómo se produce dicho andamiaje. Entre los resultados se destacan la presencia de sincronía interactiva basada en un pulso subyacente, la construcción de una mutualidad entre adulto e infante a partir de la calidad de los motivos compartidos, la ampliación del espacio de juego y el sostenimiento de la atención conjunta y la fluidez interactiva.

The pretend play, one that involves the creation of an imaginary situation, has been a privileged object of study in developmental psychology framed in the linguistic turn. Its important role in the development of complex psychological functions, such as language, theory of mind or narrative capacity, has been pointed out. In recent years, there has been a change in focus in the human sciences that has been dubbed the corporal turn: a re-focus on the analysis and conceptualization of bodily aspects that are at the base of various cognitive capacities. Thanks to the use of analysis tools typical of the temporal arts –such as music and dance– to the field of cognitive psychology, a new form of play has been documented in early childhood: the forms of vitality play. It recovers the idea of forms of vitality from Stern (2010), which refers to affects that cannot be reflected in the lexicon of Darwinian emotions. The forms of vitality are a Gestalt, an emergent property where movement, time, force, space and directionality/ intentionality are integrated; they are a fundamental property of multimodal exchanges in the adult-baby dyad as well as of the experience, as spectator or performer, of non-figurative temporal arts such as dance and music. The forms of vitality play arise as a reconceptualization of the notion of musical play and is considered a reissue of early social play with a symmetrical participation of the child in the composition of play. It is defined as any pleasant or self-remunerative activity, in which motifs of movements and/or sounds are elaborated according to the repetition-variation form, at the expense of any figurative content. The forms of vitality play have been observed in the third year of the child’s life and it has been pointed out that it can manifest in a simple way or in combination with the pretend play. Likewise, it was suggested that when the pretend play is presented in combination with the forms of vitality play, the latter could be scaffolding the pretend play, although how this happens has not been clearly specified. The objective of the present study is to carry out a microanalysis of the sounds and movements of a pretend play scene combined with forms of vitality play of a girl of 1 year and 11 months of age and an adult, in order to know how such scaffolding is produced. The sound envelope was analyzed in order to identify and describe the timing of the sounds. Regarding movement, specialized software was used to graph its trajectory and for the analysis of the expression of movements, the basic categories “Shape and Effort” of the Laban-Bartenieff system of movement analysis were used (Laban, 1971). The results indicate the presence of interactive synchrony based on an underlying pulse that sustains mutuality between the players and provides a temporal structure on which the synchrony of the self can be anchored. Furthermore, it allows the sharing of continuity and contrast in the quality of sounds and movements and thus provides the dyad with a primary level of understanding with non-mediated meanings; promotes the exploration of the play space and the expansion of the potential of the fictional scene; it favors the maintenance of joint attention and mutual understanding through ontogenetically pre-fiction semiotic mechanisms, which favor the interactive fluidity of play.