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| Foreword | |
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| Preface | |
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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Illustrations | |
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| The puzzle of play | |
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| A cause for rejoicing and a cause for caution | |
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| What do rats do when play fighting? | |
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| The playful rat | |
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| The development of play fighting | |
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| Was it good for you, big boy? | |
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| Rethinking the play fighting of rats | |
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| Sex differences in play fighting | |
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| Turning a mouse into a rat | |
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| Turning a mouse brain into a rat brain | |
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| The peculiarities of play fighting in murid rodents | |
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| On making species comparisons | |
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| Reciprocity and fairness in play fighting | |
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| How much like sex is murid play fighting? | |
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| The neural control of play fighting | |
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| The role of the cortex | |
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| Is complex play fighting a by-product of changes to the brain and its development? | |
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| Explaining species differences in the complexity of play | |
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| So, what does playing buy you? | |
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| Juvenile play and the rehearsal of action patterns | |
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| Is it really the deprivation of play that causes the deficits in animals that have been reared in isolation? | |
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| Being better at coping with stress | |
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| The uniqueness of the juvenile play experience | |
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| Learning to cope | |
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| The many benefits problem revisited | |
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| Brain begets play and play begets brain | |
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| Playing for the present | |
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| I can't wait until I have grown up to get value out of playing | |
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| Play fighting as social assessment and social manipulation | |
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| Wisdom in the trees | |
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| Delayed and immediate functions of play revisited | |
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| Taking species diversity seriously | |
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| Mouse play to rat play revisited | |
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| From handling pups roughly to parental play | |
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| Returning to some unanswered oddities | |
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| All roads lead to Rome | |
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| What's so good about play fighting? | |
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| The uses of ambiguity | |
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| And on to humans | |
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| How to become good at being ambiguous | |
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| Why is play fighting more frequent in boys than girls? | |
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| From here to eternity | |
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| The deconstruction of complexity | |
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| Where do we go from here? | |
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| Endnotes | |
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| Bibliography | |
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| Index | |