section_path: Development and learning
section_name: Development and learning
paragraph_text: Development and learning
  
  Learning through play has been long recognized as a critical aspect of childhood and child development. Some of the earliest studies of play started in the 1890s with G. Stanley Hall, the father of the child study movement that sparked an interest in the developmental, mental, and behavioral world of babies and children. Play promotes healthy development of parent-child bonds, establishing social, emotional, and cognitive developmental milestones that help them relate to others, manage stress, and learn resiliency.
  
  Modern research in the field of affective neuroscience (the neural mechanisms of emotion) has uncovered important links between role play and neurogenesis in the brain. For example, researcher Roger Caillois used the word ilinx to describe the momentary disruption of perception that comes from forms of physical play that disorient the senses, especially balance.
  
  Play is positively correlated with coping with daily stressors in children. By playing, children regulate their emotions. This is important for adaptive functioning because without regulation, emotions could be overwhelming and stressful.
  
  Evolutionary psychologists have begun to explore the phylogenetic relationship between higher intelligence in humans and its relationship to play, i.e., the relationship of play to the progress of whole evolutionary groups as opposed to the psychological implications of play to a specific individual.