The acronym STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) is usually collocated with the terms “learning” or “education.” However, these terms often have formal and technical connotations. On the other hand, informal toy play sessions provide an alternative context to incorporate STEAM improvement into the daily routine (Bergen, 2009; Toub et al., 2019; Martin and Murphy, 2022) since out-of school activities are just as important as in-school activities for STEAM development (Gözüm et al., 2022), and children spend a considerable amount of time playing with toys outside of school (Giddings and Halverson, 1981; Halpern et al., 2007; Bekker et al., 2009). Research demonstrates that playing with construction toys, which consist of units assembled in multiple configurations (Brosnan, 1998; Stannard et al., 2001; Weller et al., 2008), predicts achievement in STEAM-related disciplines (Wai et al., 2009; Trawick-Smith et al., 2016; Borriello and Liben, 2017). The primary mediatory factor in this relationship is spatial cognition, which refers to the ability to interact with the vicinity in a three-dimensional way, physically or mentally (Vasilyeva and Lourenco, 2012; Newcombe et al., 2013; Bower et al., 2020a). Children employ spatial cognition in many daily activities, such as tool use, games, route finding, and school-related tasks.

Developmental psychology and toy design are the two fields relevant to using toys for improving spatial cognition and STEAM success. However, these fields are currently not well connected. On the one hand, developmental psychology studies are conducted mainly with a limited variety of toys (e.g., building blocks); alternative toy designs are not considered for enhancing spatial development, yet their affordances may contribute to different aspects of spatial cognition. Although there were some attempts to conduct research on the different construction toys, they were shadowed with methodological concerns. For instance, Vander Heyden et al. (2017) assessed the improvement in the various spatial skills with a pre- and post-test intervention that involved various toys; however, the toys were not distributed systematically in the training procedure. Participants played with several toys in each training session and their cumulative effect was tested at the post-test phase. Hence, the separate effect of each training session and each toy design on the post-test results was obscured. In another study, Ralph et al. (2020), magna tiles toy was used rather than typical building blocks. Yet, there was no emphasis on this toy’s affordances (i.e., how its physical attributes support spatial cognition). It was chosen solely as a context to elicit spatial play by mother and child dyads.

On the other hand, toy design research rarely considers evidence from developmental psychology regarding toy development and child interaction. The ones that involve psychology theories sometimes lack depth in their conceptual definitions. For instance, Geurts et al. (2014) developed digital cubes to improve perspective taking skill however the term was defined in a limited way as detecting right and left of another agent. In another study, Rigo et al. (2016) criticized the repetitive cubicle design of building blocks in the market, and proposed an alternative design that consists of various polyhedrons. However, they did not provide a rationale to their new design in relation to development of spatial skills.

Instances above demonstrate the lack of a dialog between developmental psychology and toy design literatures. The current review aims to highlight and strengthen this connection, which is a first attempt for both lines of literature. While illustrating the gaps, first the existing evidence on the malleability of three different spatial skills (i.e., mental rotation, mental folding, and perspective taking) will be presented. Then some toy design examples will be shared, in relation to their potential to foster these three spatial skills. Last, six recommendations will be provided for future research to highlight what can be done further regarding toy design. Also a benchmark of construction toys will be presented based on their contribution to spatial skill development. The upshot of this review is to combine the perspectives of developmental psychology and design research to address how to diversify the spatial affordance of toys for child-caregiver dyads. Although some existing studies attempt to bridge the psychology and the design literatures (Hekler et al., 2013; Beşevli et al., 2022), no study so far has focused on the spatial cognition domain in relation to toy design.

Playing with spatial toys such as blocks and puzzles offers opportunities for exploring different object orientations and viewer perspectives (Casey et al., 2008; Pirrone et al., 2015; Vander Heyden et al., 2017). Similar mental exercises are required for STEAM fields (Hinze et al., 2013; Uttal et al., 2013b; Polinsky et al., 2022); consequently, playing with those toys facilitates STEAM development (Wolfgang et al., 2003; Hanline et al., 2010; Taylor and Hutton, 2013).

Three spatial skills are potentially related to STEAM success. First, mental rotation, which refers to changing the orientation of an object’s mental representation at a certain angle (Shepard and Metzler, 1971; Hawes et al., 2015; Lauer et al., 2015). Second, mental folding, which stands for changing the physical properties of an object while moving it in a given space, for example, transforming a two-dimensional paper into a three-dimensional structure (Atit et al., 2013; Harris et al., 2013b; Burte et al., 2017). Third, perspective taking, which refers to the ability to see a scene from another point of view (Kessler and Rutherford, 2010; Erle and Topolinski, 2015; Gunia et al., 2021). Previous studies have mainly investigated mental rotation training, while mental folding and perspective taking skills have been largely overlooked (Cherney et al., 2014; Newcombe and Shipley, 2014; Vander Heyden et al., 2017). Thus, training in those two spatial skills needs attention considering their contribution to STEAM development (Mix and Cheng, 2012; Newcombe, 2017; Hodgkiss et al., 2018).

While it is expected that developmental psychology literature should use and compare various toy designs for their impact on different spatial skills, design studies should also incorporate theoretical frameworks of developmental psychology into the toy design process. However, these frameworks may not be readily available for toy designers to access and interpret (Hall et al., 2022). Furthermore, the reasons why toy producers add certain features to their designs and what particular points they consider while designing construction toys are not immediately transparent, even though there may in fact be several theoretical foundations employed in the current toy designs (DeCortin, 2015). Therefore, enhancing the spatial characteristics of the construction toys is an important step in bridging the gaps observed between theory and practice (Hekler et al., 2013; Borriello and Liben, 2017; Yang et al., 2020). Through this review paper, we aim to provide the following recommendations to the design field by revisiting both strands of literature:

1. Include mental folding components.

A literature review was conducted systematically to assemble various research studies written about malleability of spatial skills, STEAM education, and toy design between the years 1969 and 2022. In this review, we used both expansive databases like Google Scholar, Elsevier, ProQuest, PubMed and EBSCO, and domain specific databases like PsycInfo and ACM digital library. The keywords used to explore relevant articles were “malleability,” “spatial cognition,” “perspective taking,” “mental rotation,” “mental folding,” “construction toys,” “building blocks,” “spatial training,” “spatial intervention,” “spatial input,” and “informal STEAM education.” We used the handles “AND,” to affiliate search terms between each category, and “OR,” to connect search terms within each category.

All articles examined in the process of the literature review were analyzed based on their abstracts by the first three authors. Then based on the relevance of each article to the current concept of this paper, articles were either removed from the reference list or kept to be further analyzed to support the research of this paper. While the articles were being reviewed, their reference lists were also examined to expand the scope of the literature review through snowballing.

The publications included in the literature search would be considered suitable if they met the following criterion: (a) articles focusing exclusively on malleability of spatial skills or construction toy design, (b) papers only published in English, and (c) papers that are published in peer-reviewed journals. Papers were excluded based on the following criteria: (a) works that are not accessible through the databases, (b) works that did not address the relationship demonstrated in the objectives of this paper, which are construction toys and spatial skill development, (c) any unpublished data, and (d) and short communications, and editorials.

Spatial cognition is an essential ability for many species as it enables individuals to understand the three-dimensional world better. Skills that make up spatial cognition reveal themselves in two ways: Tool making and navigating in the environment (Ehrlich et al., 2006; Morganti et al., 2009; Newcombe et al., 2013). Thus, spatial cognition directly connects to daily tasks like understanding a map or organizing a wardrobe (Vasilyeva and Lourenco, 2012; Meneghetti et al., 2015; Bower et al., 2020a). Aside from these uses, spatial skills are related to school readiness (Verdine et al., 2014) and numerical cognition (Newcombe et al., 2015), consequently predicting achievement in STEAM disciplines (Wai et al., 2009; Taylor and Hutton, 2013; Uttal et al., 2013b).

The conceptual scope of spatial cognition must be clarified since various definitions exist in the literature and a common framework is yet to be established (Resnick and Shipley, 2013; Newcombe and Shipley, 2014; Mix et al., 2018). A comprehensive and empirically tested theory, which is supported by neural (Creem et al., 2001; Wraga et al., 2005; Lambrey et al., 2011) and behavioral findings from different age groups (Taylor and Hutton, 2013; Vander Heyden et al., 2017; Hodgkiss et al., 2018), classifies spatial skills through a 2×2 matrix. This matrix is based on the mental representations’ static/dynamic and intrinsic/extrinsic properties (Uttal et al., 2013a; Yang et al., 2020; Bower et al., 2020b) (see Table 1).

Static spatial cognition allows individuals to interpret non-moving objects, while dynamic spatial cognition enables them to follow changing stimuli. Research shows that static and dynamic spatial cognition have different underlying mechanisms (Kozhevnikov et al., 2002, 2005). The other axis of the 2×2 matrix includes intrinsic and extrinsic spatial representations. Intrinsic spatial cognition refers to understanding within object relationships, and it is a key skill for tool use (Harris et al., 2013a; Newcombe and Shipley, 2014; Frick, 2018). Extrinsic spatial cognition refers to understanding the relationship between objects, which is necessary for navigation (Kinach, 2012; Atit et al., 2013; Newcombe et al., 2013). Research indicates that extrinsic and intrinsic spatial skills follow different neural pathways (Chatterjee, 2008; Li et al., 2019; Gunia et al., 2021), and have separate mechanisms (Huttenlocher and Presson, 1973; Hegarty and Waller, 2004; Newcombe et al., 2013; Hodgkiss et al., 2018). Vander Heyden et al. (2017) explain this mechanism via different strategies used by the participants for mental transformation and perspective taking tasks: object transformation and viewer transformation, respectively. Through the object transformation strategy, participants tend to mentally change the target object’s orientation without changing their position. On the other hand, during the viewer transformation strategy, participants mentally rotate themselves in a given space and change their frame of reference to perceive an object from a different point of view (Hegarty and Waller, 2005; Harris et al., 2013a; Vander Heyden et al., 2017).

In the current review, we will focus on the informal training tools (i.e., toys) for the two intrinsic dynamic spatial skills: mental rotation and mental folding, and an extrinsic dynamic skill: perspective taking. The literature is rich in examining intrinsic dynamic spatial relations (Frick et al., 2013a; Uttal et al., 2013a; Newcombe and Shipley, 2014). However, existing studies primarily focus on mental rotation; overlooking the mental folding skill (Atit et al., 2013; Harris et al., 2013a; Hilton et al., 2022). Furthermore, there is a lack of training for improving extrinsic dynamic spatial skills (i.e., perspective taking) (Mori and Cigala, 2015; Vander Heyden et al., 2017; Tian et al., 2021). Perspective taking skill is crucial as it is both a spatial and social ability (Shelton et al., 2012; Clements-Stephens et al., 2013; Tarampi et al., 2016) supported by neural findings (Lambrey et al., 2011; Gunia et al., 2021). Socio-communicational tasks such as referential communication (Keysar et al., 2000; Nilsen and Fecica, 2011; Yadollahi et al., 2022), empathy (Erle and Topolinski, 2015), and Theory of Mind demand the utilization of perspective taking (Barnes-Holmes et al., 2004; Tian et al., 2021; Strikwerda-Brown et al., 2022). Studies with developmentally atypical individuals are in line with the social component of perspective taking since children with autism spectrum disorder experience difficulty in visuospatial perspective taking tasks, while their mental rotation skill is intact (Hamilton et al., 2009; Pearson et al., 2013; Cardillo et al., 2020). There may indeed be a connection between perspective taking capacity and STEAM achievement, even though the link is not studied much (Mix and Cheng, 2012; Newcombe, 2017).

Designing play interactions is as important as designing the physical properties of the toys (Wooldridge and Shapka, 2012; Black et al., 2016; Yamada-Rice, 2018) (design recommendation 3). For instance, one of the major strengths of construction toys is to promote spatial talk during play sessions (Ferrara et al., 2011; Levine et al., 2012; Yang and Pan, 2021) and various toys tend to elicit spatial language in different amounts (Verdine et al., 2014). There is a link between spatial language use and improvement in mental rotation skill (Polinsky et al., 2017; Ralph et al., 2020; Turan et al., 2021). The language used during construction play enables one to create and express mental representations, and triggers spatial thinking (Casasola et al., 2020; Bower et al., 2020a; Miller-Goldwater and Simmering, 2022). Designing play experience is as important as designing the toys’ objecthood in the toy design process (Wooldridge and Shapka, 2012; Verdine et al., 2014; Black et al., 2016). Play experience entails all the communicative interactions children experience around the toy, including with their parents, teachers, peers, etc. when they play collaboratively (Healey and Mendelsohn, 2018; Ralph et al., 2020). This is also relevant for spatial play since it elicits spatial language (Ho et al., 2017; Verdine et al., 2019; Casasola et al., 2020). According to the coding scheme proposed by Cannon et al. (2007), spatial language can be captured through words describing spatial features (e.g., near, in front of, next to, tilt it down, etc.) and properties of objects (e.g., big, short, square, round, etc.). It has been shown that parents use more spatial language when playing with blocks (Ferrara et al., 2011) and puzzles (Levine et al., 2012), and when parents use more spatial language, children’s usage increases as well (Pruden et al., 2011; Kısa et al., 2018; Clingan-Siverly et al., 2021).

Enabling guided play scenarios, where spatial language is encouraged, is an opportunity for implementing linguistic input into play. In guided play, adults focus the child’s interest on the learning objectives by using verbal scaffolding, asking open-ended questions, posing problems, thinking out loud, praising and encouraging discoveries made by the child (Fisher et al., 2013; Weisberg et al., 2013; Cohen and Emmons, 2016). It has been demonstrated in multiple studies that children benefit from guided play more than they do from free play or didactic play in terms of learning new skills, including mental rotation (Fisher et al., 2013; Ramani et al., 2014; Borriello and Liben, 2017).

Furthermore, guided play with construction toys can be an engaging way of improving spatial cognition for adults and children simultaneously. However, to our knowledge, no studies investigated the mutual benefits of guided play for adults and children. Studies assert that spatial skill malleability does not exclude adults (Uttal et al., 2013a; Cherney et al., 2014; Kornkasem and Black, 2015). Adults may also benefit from interacting with the right instrument designed to enhance spatial skills; however, the literature lacks an engaging way to develop adult spatial cognition (Newcombe, 2017). Guided building play can improve adults’ spatial skills, as it helps to improve children’s, since adults also enjoy interacting with construction toys (Ginoulhiac, 2013; Toub et al., 2019). Previous literature implies that spatial gains may be simultaneous for parents and children dyads engaging in spatial play, no particular study sheds light on this subject.

In terms of the content of the guided play, presenting a training stimulus in combination with either realistic or fantastic but especially with fantastic narrative context is found to be beneficial for learning in many domains, for instance, word learning (Weisberg et al., 2015). The same is also valid for spatial cognition, such that the benefit a child gains from the language produced during play can be enhanced by adding a narrative component (Rohlfing and Nachtigäller, 2016), since the narrative may motivate the children and make the play experience more engaging (Casey et al., 2008). In addition to helping with the learning process, narrative input is known to help retain what is learned (Bower and Clark, 1969; Graesser et al., 1980). Thus, implementing thematic elements such as animals or human characters into the construction toy can lead children to create stories, engage more enthusiastically with the enacted story world, and interact more in a spatial manner.

However, it must be noted that the thematic pieces should be supplementary material rather than the main focus as they may distract the child and jeopardize the spatial characteristics of the play activity (Stanton and Weisberg, 1996; Wellhousen and Kieff, 2001; Tunks, 2009). To compose an architectural setting once and create stories inside the structure, such as a doll house, is not an efficient way of practicing spatial skills because building and rebuilding multiple times is the key parameter for practicing spatial representations (Jirout and Newcombe, 2015; Fanning, 2018; Rode and Cucuiat, 2018). The aforementioned disadvantageous thematic elements can be observed in the themed sets based on objects, vehicles, and buildings from media such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. These product lines act more as collection items than construction toys (Wolf, 2014; Fanning, 2018). Once individuals get these sets, they follow the instructions, complete the suggested composition and rarely pull it apart again. In this way, the construction pieces become display material and lose their ability to promote spatial thinking when built only once. Another side effect of the thematic product lines is that the benefit of stimulating creativity would be lost when predetermined instructions are followed instead of free construction (Moreau and Engeset, 2016; Fulcher and Hayes, 2017; Rode and Cucuiat, 2018).

Although this issue is mostly considered in relation to children’s spatial learning and play experience, it is worth noting that adults’ spatial gains also suffer from construction toys that are overwhelmingly themed. Construction materials targeting adults are almost exclusively of this sort and lack the assembling and reassembling aspects that promote spatial learning. As previously mentioned, adults can benefit from spatial training either by themselves or engaging in guided play (Newcombe et al., 2013; Cherney et al., 2014; Kornkasem and Black, 2015). Through a convenient design that engages both the adult and the child, construction toys can eliminate the age gap in the market and bring adults and children together in a way that creates an opportunity for mutual benefit gathered from a single training tool.

Gesture production is another scaffolding tool children can benefit from while playing with construction toys, especially if they are designed to encourage both the child and the adult to produce gestures (Kısa et al., 2018; Bower et al., 2020b; Clingan-Siverly et al., 2021). Both gesture production and observing someone while gesturing are valuable for fostering spatial reasoning (Ehrlich et al., 2006; Chu and Kita, 2011; Toub et al., 2019). Besides, Goldin-Meadow et al. (2012) revealed that gesture production is more effective for mental rotation improvement than observing someone while gesturing. Gestures’ contribution to mental rotation skill is rooted in the communicating visuospatial modality (Baykal et al., 2018; Yang et al., 2020). For instance, gestures can represent objects, directions, and orientations (Alibali, 2005; Galati et al., 2017; Karadöller et al., 2021); they essentially allow spatial language to be converted to physical expressions. Indeed, gestures are situated in the middle of the visual and verbal expression styles (Newcombe et al., 2013). In an empirical study, Stieff et al. (2016) demonstrated that gestures foster STEAM performance by converting the imagined movement of mental representations into a concrete movement in the physical space. In this way, gestures provide solutions for the spatial visualization challenges, which can be encountered in STEAM tasks (Chu and Kita, 2011; Stieff et al., 2016). It is also found that worse performers in the traditional paper and pencil mental rotation task tend to gesture more to convey static information in comparison to those who performed better in mental rotation (Göksun et al., 2013), demonstrating that individuals strive to resolve a cognitively demanding spatial task for them through the aid of gestures and overcome the challenge. Using gestures during spatial activities can facilitate spatial skills; however, few studies investigate the role of gesture input in spatial reasoning (Yang et al., 2020; Clingan-Siverly et al., 2021).

To sum up, the interactions that engage adults with their children can provide opportunities for both parties to benefit since studies demonstrate that adult spatial cognition is also malleable (Uttal et al., 2013a; Cherney et al., 2014; Kornkasem and Black, 2015) and adults also enjoy playing with construction toys (Ginoulhiac, 2013; Toub et al., 2019), although there is no inclusive, enjoyable intervention for their spatial skills (Newcombe, 2017). Therefore, concept designs that invite children and adults to play and benefit together must be produced (design recommendation 4). To date, no research has investigated the simultaneous cognitive benefits of construction play for adults and children. Still, there are studies showing adults scaffold children’s spatial development (Vygotsky, 1978; Trawick-Smith, 1998) by using narratives (Casey et al., 2008), spatial language (Ferrara et al., 2011; Pruden et al., 2011; Cohen and Emmons, 2016), and gestures (Chu and Kita, 2011; Kısa et al., 2018; Clingan-Siverly et al., 2021). Features of language, narrative, and gesture input must be incorporated into the play experiences (Verdine et al., 2014) to facilitate at-home STEAM development (design recommendation 5). Furthermore, affordances provided by the construction toys must be varied with the choice of more abstract units to build unlimited combinations (Reifel, 1984; Ginoulhiac, 2013; Trawick-Smith et al., 2014) as opposed to contemporary licensed thematic sets, in which individuals consistently replicate the forms of popular movie settings (Wolf, 2014; Fanning, 2018) and create display materials in which narrative features shadow the construction play (design recommendation 6).

Access to quality STEAM education starting from the preschool period is known to be a predictor for future academic success (Gözüm et al., 2022). Thus, play interactions are fruitful investments for joyfully and effectively increasing STEAM success in an informal context, in view of strong evidence for the link between well-developed spatial cognition and achievement in the STEAM-related fields. A multitude of studies demonstrate that playing with construction toys enhances spatial reasoning; thus, making construction toys an accessible tool contributes to informal STEAM development. Although certain aspects of spatial skills in relation to construction toys have been already investigated, this paper pointed out several gaps in the research area. To bridge this gap, it revisited developmental psychology and design literature, presented existing discussions in the developmental psychology field and some construction toy examples available in the toy market and design studies through a benchmark. In the end, six recommendations were identified to provide guidance about what could be done further to support both toy design and developmental psychology by strengthening the link between the two fields.

One of the main takeaways of this paper is that developmental psychology and design fields should collaborate more to design toys that contribute to informal STEAM development in children. Design researchers have an important role in this regard as they can act as the mediators of theoretical knowledge derived from developmental psychology, who turn empirical knowledge into actionable design guidelines for design practitioners. The first research question in this paper was which findings from developmental psychology had not yet been applied to toy design. In search of an answer, we created a benchmark for construction toys’ potential contributions to spatial skills, which is prepared in accordance with spatial affordances of over fifty toys from the market and design research studies (see Table 2 for the spatial skill contribution of the toys, and Appendix A for the toys’ relevant affordances). A thorough review of these toys demonstrated that existing construction toys focus more on supporting mental rotation skill, while very few address mental folding and perspective taking skills. This seems to be a missed opportunity for design, indicating a need to integrate design features that can support various spatial cognition skills (i.e., mental folding and/or perspective taking in addition to mental rotation). The benchmark showed that the main problem in this literature is the need to investigate other construction units in addition to the typical brick system in spatial toys. Accordingly, there are very few toy options that can foster perspective taking and all three skills together, although various toy designs may contribute to different spatial skills. Studies conducted with these toys are limited to small-scale user studies. Empirical methodology with larger sample sizes comparing different toys’ affordances as stimuli can provide evidence regarding the positive impact of toys on the three spatial skills (i.e., mental rotation, mental folding, and perspective taking).

The second research question was how to present the knowledge obtained regarding the first question to designers in a feasible way while effectively closing the gap between the two disciplines. In order to do so, the findings from theoretical foundations of developmental psychology were combined with the design features of the construction toys to demonstrate market tendencies for enhancing spatial skills (see Table 2). Additionally, we produced six design recommendations that designers can refer to while developing new toys (see Table 3). These recommendations include some key points for the toy design as well as designing the play experiences, since designing a play interaction is as important as the physical features of the construction toys. If training spatial skills in young children will be achieved, their adult partners (parents, teachers, etc.) must be encouraged to produce the necessary spatial input (e.g., spatial talk or gesture) for the emergence of spatial play. Another potential contribution of engaging adults in spatial play is that they may also benefit from this interaction in the form of spatial skills development. Thus, the interests of different personas (i.e., adults and children) should be considered. In line with these insights and background literature, the design recommendations were prepared to inspire designers and fill the gaps in this area of literature.

The final research question was what are the responsibilities that developmental psychologists had in bridging the gap between their field and toy design. On the side of developmental psychology, there is a call for more research of construction toy designs that include different affordances rather than focusing solely on typical brick-shaped units (see Appendix A). Doing so would potentially provide empirical evidence of the expected benefits of a wider range of construction toys to mental folding and perspective taking skills, skills that are overlooked, in addition to the well-studied mental rotation skills. The benchmark provided in Table 2 attempts to give a glimpse of the full picture in the construction toy market based on their potential contribution to mental rotation, mental folding and perspective taking skills. However, it should be noted that it is hypothetical to claim whether the affordances of those toys satisfy their matched spatial skills due to the lack of empirical research conducted on such toy designs. Hence, it would be beneficial for future studies to investigate the above-mentioned connections.

Overall, this review aimed to point out that there is a lack of collaboration between developmental psychology and toy design fields. Developmental psychology studies are mostly executed with a limited variety of toys (i.e., block-type construction toys) and are focused on the mental rotation skill. Alternative toy designs are not considered while facilitating spatial development, although their affordances may contribute to different aspects of spatial cognition (i.e., mental folding and perspective taking). On the other hand, toy design research barely considers theoretical frameworks from developmental psychology, or the empirical backgrounds of existing products in the market are not always clear. Through revealing these issues and investigating developmental psychology and toy design with a lens of spatial cognition, this paper initiates a dialog between these fields to foster informal STEAM development.

Çİ, ME, DK, AC, TG, and AK designed and conceptualized the study. Çİ, ME, and DK reviewed the literature and wrote sections. ME and DK conducted market research, drew visuals, and prepared tables. Çİ and DK wrote the first draft of the manuscript. AC, TG, and AK read, revised, and provided feedback for the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.