Children’s play differs from both exploring and exploiting

Although play is common in many cultures and species, existing theories of play ultimately account for only small subsets of all play behaviors. Here, we contrast play with two well-understood forms of behavior—exploration and exploitation—and investigate the hypothesis that at least some forms of play have objectives that are distinct from both information gain and reward. In both a foraging task reminiscent of classical decision-making studies and a more naturalistic setting (interacting with a commonly available playset), we analyzed US children’s behavior when given a prompt guiding them to explore, exploit, play, or do whatever they wanted to do. We found in both experiments that children’s behavior differed significantly and systematically across conditions. These results suggest that play does not merely involve seeking information or reward but is a distinct mode of behavior with other motivations. In particular, when they were instructed to play, children preferentially generated new goals and attempted to accomplish them.