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Playful interaction stands at the heart of shared artistic processes, grounded in spontaneity, creativity, imagination, and shared experience. It allows participants to step outside their routine roles and predictable patterns to co-create something new together. This presentation focuses on playful interactions in drama, dance movement, and visual arts with older adults.

In a series of studies with more than 150 older adults, we examined the psychological, cognitive, and neurophysiological effects of different forms of improvised playful interactions: improvised role-play and dramatic enactment, movement improvisation, and shared improvised drawing through squiggle games. Findings show that playful interactions enhance cognitive functioning in working memory, word fluency, and response time, compared with a non-playful control condition. They also enhance positive affect and shared experience.

In a complementary fMRI pilot study, playful social interaction was associated with increased hippocampal activation and enhanced fusiform gyrus responses to emotional faces, compared with a non-playful control condition. These preliminary findings suggest that playful interactions in creative arts therapies may support socio-emotional perception and memory in later life by modulating neural systems involved in face processing and memory encoding.

We propose that playful interactions balance spontaneity, unpredictability, and reciprocity, engaging neurobiological mechanisms that support cognitive functioning in later life. These findings underscore the importance of playful interactions in the creative arts therapies and arts-based interventions for older adults.