Observers' proficiency at identifying pretense acts based on behavioral cues

Discriminating what is pretense from what is real is a fundamental problem in development. Research has addressed the proficiency with which adults and children discriminate between play fighting and real fighting, and yet none (to our knowledge) has investigated discrimination of other kinds of pretense and real acts. In addition, little is known about what aspects of pretender behavior (as opposed to pretend content) might cue pretense interpretations. In two experiments, 8-20 s clips showing pretense and real snack behaviors were presented to adult and child participants. All participants distinguished between pretense and real behaviors at better than chance level. Furthermore, certain features (specific looking patterns and mistimed behaviors) were most prominent in the videotapes that were most often correctly identified. This provides empirical support for the suggestion that these cues, as opposed to more commonly cited cues, like smiles, might serve as important indicators of pretense for children and adults.     

Mothers' behavior modifications during pretense and their possible signal value for toddlers

An important issue for understanding early cognition is why very young children's real-world representations do not get confused by pretense events. One possible source of information for children is the pretender's behaviors. Pretender behaviors may vary systematically across real and pretend scenarios, perhaps signaling to toddlers to interpret certain events as not real. Pretender behaviors were examined in 2 experiments in which mothers were asked both to pretend to have a snack and really to have a snack with their 18-month-olds. Episodes were analyzed for condition differences in verbal and nonverbal behaviors, including smiling, looking, laughter, and functional movements. Reliable differences were found across conditions for several variables. In a 3rd experiment, children's apparent understanding of pretense in relation to their mothers' behaviors was examined, and significant associations were found with some of the mothers' behavioral changes but not others. This work provides a first inroad into the issue of how children learn to interpret pretense acts as pretense.     

The Development of Representations of Pretend Object Substitutions

Many theories of how pretense is mentally represented have been posited, but none have been effectually empirically tested to date. This research is the first to explore how children and adults mentally process simple pretend actions, specifically pretend object substitutions, and whether this representation changes with age. Preschoolers, older children, and undergraduates heard or read about a variety of pretend object substitutions, and their reaction time to name an image related to the object's real identity, pretend identity, or an unrelated image was measured. To test what is unique to pretense, these reaction times were compared to those from participants who responded to the same images after reading about nonpretend versions of the same actions. Results suggest that preschoolers inhibit reality when representing a pretend action, older children activate an object's real and pretend identities equally, and adults activate the object's real identity more than the pretend one. Implications for current theories of pretense representation are discussed.     

Children’s understanding of the mind’s involvement in pretense: do words bend the truth?

Many have thought that children have an early appreciation of the role of the mind in pretense, fitting with the notion that pretend play is, in general, a ‘zone of proximal development’ ( Vygotsky, 1978 ). Although results from several experiments are against this hypothesis, the evidence from that line of research has been questioned because the experiments thus far have always used the word ‘pretend’. Young children might have a perfectly clear understanding that pretense involves the mind, but have mismapped the word ‘pretend’ onto non‐mental correlates of pretending, like action and costume. Two experiments tested this possibility. Four‐year‐olds were shown videos of people engaging in real and pretend activities and asked questions regarding the role of mind; for half the children the word ‘pretend’ was used to describe the activity, and for half it was not. Contrary to the hypothesis, even when the word ‘pretend’ was not used, roughly half of the 4‐year‐olds failed to designate pretense as involving mental activity. Consistent with prior work, more children of this age were cognizant of the mind’s involvement in pretense than were cognizant of the mind’s involvement in physical actions.     

Young children know that trying is not pretending: a test of the "behaving-as-if" construal of children's early concept of pretense

In 3 studies, young children were tested for their understanding of pretend actions. In Studies 1 and 2, pairs of superficially similar behaviors were presented to 26- and 36-month-old children in an imitation game. In one case the behavior was marked as trying (signs of effort), and in the other case as pretending (signs of playfulness). Three-year-olds, and to some degree 2-year-olds, performed the real action themselves (or tried to really perform it) after the trying model, whereas after the pretense model, they only pretended. Study 3 ruled out a simple mimicking explanation by showing that children not only imitated differentially but responded differentially with appropriate productive pretending to pretense models and with appropriate productive tool use to trying models. The findings of the 3 studies demonstrate that by 2 to 3 years of age, children have a concept of pretense as a specific type of intentional activity.     

Pretend Play as Twin Earth: A Social-Cognitive Analysis

Pretend play appears to be important to a theory of mind, but exactly how or why has been controversial. One widely entertained hypothesis about why pretense is important to understanding minds is termed the Metarepresentational Model. According to this model, children knowingly consider and manipulate mental representations during pretense. Children appreciate these mental representations as such and later come to apply their understanding of mental representation outside of pretense domains. This article reviews evidence relevant to the metarepresentational model, and it is concluded that the evidence does not support it. Alternative models of the relationship between pretense and theory of mind are reviewed, culminating in a proposed developmental model of the relation. The Twin Earth model proposes specific relations between pretend play and understanding minds, from the ontogenesis of pretense to the later emergence of role play and mental representational understandings of pretense. Central to the proposal is the supposition that pretend play functions for children in much the way that Twin Earth functions for philosophers—by allowing for participation in and reasoning about nonactual situations.     

Recognition of pretend and real actions in play by 1- and 2-year-olds: Early success and why they fail

We compared 1- and 2-year-old children's performance on Pretend and Reality tasks. Pretend tasks involved the comprehension of a pretend scenario, whereas Reality tasks did not. For example, the experimenter pretends to drink water from an empty cup, she fills another cup with imaginary water and then invites the child to drink. In the Reality version, the experimenter uses real water in making exactly the same actions and the same request to the child. Our aim was to verify when very young children understand pretense, and to determine whether failures to understand pretense are the result of difficulties specific to pretense or not. Results showed that starting from 16 months, children begin to understand pretense. At no time did performance differ between Pretend and Reality tasks, suggesting that young children's difficulties with pretense may not arise from causes specific to pretense.     

Is young children’s recognition of pretense metarepresentational or merely behavioral? Evidence from 2- and 3-year-olds’ understanding of pretend sounds and speech

When young children observe pretend-play, do they interpret it simply as a type of behavior, or do they infer the underlying mental state that gives the behavior meaning? This is a long-standing question with deep implications for how “theory on mind” develops. The two leading accounts of shared pretense give opposing answers. The behavioral theory proposes that children represent pretense as a form of behavior (behaving in a way that would be appropriate if P); the metarepresentational theory argues that children instead represent pretense via the early concept PRETEND. A test between these accounts is provided by children’s understanding of pretend sounds and speech. We report the first experiments directly investigating this understanding. In three experiments, 2- and 3-year-olds’ listened to requests that were either spoken normally, or with the pretense that a teddy bear was uttering them. To correctly fulfill the requests, children had to represent the normal utterance as the experimenter’s, and the pretend utterances as the bear’s. Children succeeded at both ages, suggesting that they can represent pretend speech (the requests) as coming from counterfactual sources (the bear rather than the experimenter). We argue that this is readily explained by the metarepresentational theory, but harder to explain if children are behaviorists about pretense.     

To be or not to be a galaprock: Preschoolers' intuitions about the importance of knowledge and action for pretending

Can someone pretend to be a galaprock without knowing what a galaprock is? Do children recognize that such knowledge is required for pretending? Three studies focusing on the relations among action, knowledge and pretending suggest that children have this understanding by age 4 years. In Study 1, 4‐year‐olds and adults willingly pretended to be moving and unmoving objects but had trouble pretending to be objects that were difficult to represent physically. In Study 2, 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds claimed they could not pretend to be an unknown thing, justifying their refusals with mentalistic language indicating their ignorance of the object or its typical actions. In Study 3, 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds predicted that other children who have knowledge of an object unfamiliar to the subjects themselves can nevertheless pretend to be it, whereas those lacking that knowledge cannot. The results add support to the growing literature showing that preschoolers conceptualize pretense as involving mental activity.     

Contextual Differences in Parent–Child Play: Implications for Children's Gender Role Development

Parent–child play behavior of 33 preschool children (18 boys, 29 European-American, middle- and upper-middle-class families) was videotaped in separate pretend and physical play sessions. Children's play behavior with a same-sex peer also was observed. Analyses focus on contextual differences in parent–child play behavior, as well as associations between parent–child play and child–peer play. During the pretense play session parent–daughter dyads, particularly mother–daughter dyads, engaged in more pretense play than did parent–son dyads. During the physical play session father–son dyads engaged in more physical play than did father–daughter dyads. These data suggest that context may play an important role in gender differentiated patterns of parent–child play behavior. As for children's peer play behavior, consistent with previous evidence, girls were more likely than boys to engage peers in pretend play and boys were more likely than girls to play physically with peers. Children whose parents engaged in more pretense play engaged in more pretense play with a peer, whereas children's whose parents engaged in more physical play engaged in more physical play with a peer. These findings suggest that parents may contribute to children's gender-typed play behaviors with peers.     

On tools and toys: how children learn to act on and pretend with 'virgin objects'

The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n = 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were demonstrated with these. When children were then allowed to act upon the objects themselves, qualitatively similar patterns of cultural (imitative) learning both of pretend and of instrumental actions were observed, suggesting that both types of actions can be acquired in similar ways through processes of cultural learning involving one or another form of collective intentionality. However, both absolute imitation rates and creativity were lower in pretense compared to instrumental actions, suggesting that the collective intentionality that constitutes pretense is especially difficult for children to comprehend. An additional analysis of children's gazes to the experimenter during their actions revealed that 24-month-olds looked more often to the experimenter during pretense actions than during instrumental actions - suggesting that pretense is culturally learned in a similar fashion as practical actions, but that young children understand pretense as a more inherently social, intersubjective activity.     

Play on: Retrospective Reports of the Persistence of Pretend Play Into Middle Childhood

Piaget (1962) asserted that children stop engaging in pretend play when they enter the concrete operational stage because they become able to accommodate reality and no longer need to assimilate it to their wishes. Consistent also with the views of Vygotsky, discussion of pretend play in developmental psychology is typically confined to early childhood, yet the activity itself does not seem to be so confined. As a preliminary investigation of pretend play in middle childhood, undergraduates were asked to complete a retrospective questionnaire about their childhood pretend play. The questionnaire items queried them about the content and context of their prior pretense engagements, when and why they stopped pretending, and personality characteristics relevant to pretense and fantasy. On average, respondents reported ceasing to pretend around 11 years of age. Among the statistically significant predictors of participants’ reported ages of ceasing to pretend were gender, childhood environs, siblings’ ages, belief in fantastical entities as a child, and participants involved in the last pretend memory. This preliminary study lays a foundation for future studies exploring the role of pretending in middle childhood. Although this study suggests that pretending is still widespread in middle childhood, it sheds no light on its function. This is an important issue across all ages that future research should address.     

Young children's understanding of pretend crying: The effect of context

Reasoning about another's pretend and real crying is related to ma'ny important social cognitive abilities (e.g., emotional understanding, appearance–reality, and theory of mind). This study investigated whether children aged 6 years and younger could distinguish between instances of pretend crying and real crying as presented in stories. Sixty‐five Japanese children aged 4–6 years were given stories within two contexts (Play and Non‐play). In the Play context, the protagonist of the story was pretending to cry or really crying during a pretend play activity. In the Non‐play context, the protagonist was also pretending to cry or really crying after his/her toy had been hidden by another child. The children answered questions about these crying events. The results showed that the 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds showed significantly better understanding of pretend crying in the Play context compared to the Non‐play context. In the Non‐play context, they were significantly less likely to understand the cause of pretend crying compared to the 6‐year‐olds. The results suggest that the context of pretend play facilitates the children's understanding of pretend crying.     

The Development of Substitute Object Pretense: The Differential Importance of Form and Function

Substitute object pretense is one of the earliest-developing forms of pretense, and yet it changes considerably across the preschool years. By 3.5 years of age, children can pretend with substitutes that are highly dissimilar from their intended referents (Elder & Pederson, 1978), but even older children have difficulty understanding such pretense in others (Bigham & Bourchier-Sutton, 2007). The present studies had 3 aims: 1) to examine the relative influence of the form and function of substitute objects; 2) to replicate the age gap between pretense production and comprehension using a tightly controlled procedure; and 3) to investigate whether preschoolers’ comprehension of substitute object pretense is predicted by a) theory of mind (ToM), because it involves reading pretender intent, and (b) executive function (EF), because it involves inhibiting the substitute object’s identity. In Study 1, 3- to 5-year-old children performed at ceiling on a test of substitute object pretense production, whereas pretense comprehension improved considerably across this age range. Study 2 provided evidence that the function of a substitute object is more influential than its form in determining whether a child can comprehend pretense actions with the object. The results of Study 2 also provided support for the role of ToM in comprehending another’s pretense. Finally, Study 3 replicated the results regarding form, function, and ToM in a sample drawn from a different community. The effects of EF on pretense comprehension were inconsistent across conditions and studies, suggesting that EF may not play a major role in the comprehension of pretense with substitute objects.     

Preschooler's Understanding of the Role of Mental States and Action in Pretense

This research investigated 3- to 5-year-old's understanding of the role of intentional states and action in pretense. There are two main perspectives on how children conceptualize pretense. One view is that children understand the mental aspects of pretending (the rich interpretation). The alternative view is that children conceptualize pretense as "acting-like" and do not appreciate that the mind is crucial to pretense (the lean interpretation). The experiments in this article used a novel approach to test these two interpretations. Children were presented with two types of videotaped scenarios. In Experiment 1, children were presented with a scenario in which people wanted to be like something else (e.g., a kangaroo) and either acted like it or did not act like it. Children were asked whether the protagonists were pretending and whether they were thinking about the pretend entity. In Experiment 2, children were presented with the Experiment 1 scenarios and also with a scenario in which a person had the intention to do something else (e.g., look for her keys) but whose actions were similar to those of a pretend entity (e.g., a bear). Children were asked about the pretense, thoughts, and the intentions of the protagonists. Experiment 3 tested for the effect of asking an open-ended versus a forced-choice question on the Experiment 2 tasks. The results of this study suggest that in certain facilitating conditions (e.g., intention information salient, forced-choice question) children have an early understanding of the role of mind in pretense.     

Preschooler's Understanding of the Role of Mental States and Action in Pretense

This research investigated 3- to 5-year-old's understanding of the role of intentional states and action in pretense. There are two main perspectives on how children conceptualize pretense. One view is that children understand the mental aspects of pretending (the rich interpretation). The alternative view is that children conceptualize pretense as "acting-like" and do not appreciate that the mind is crucial to pretense (the lean interpretation). The experiments in this article used a novel approach to test these two interpretations. Children were presented with two types of videotaped scenarios. In Experiment 1, children were presented with a scenario in which people wanted to be like something else (e.g., a kangaroo) and either acted like it or did not act like it. Children were asked whether the protagonists were pretending and whether they were thinking about the pretend entity. In Experiment 2, children were presented with the Experiment 1 scenarios and also with a scenario in which a person had the intention to do something else (e.g., look for her keys) but whose actions were similar to those of a pretend entity (e.g., a bear). Children were asked about the pretense, thoughts, and the intentions of the protagonists. Experiment 3 tested for the effect of asking an open-ended versus a forced-choice question on the Experiment 2 tasks. The results of this study suggest that in certain facilitating conditions (e.g., intention information salient, forced-choice question) children have an early understanding of the role of mind in pretense.     

Social pretend play and social interaction in preschoolers

Social interaction was observed during social pretend play and nonpretend activities to determine whether positive and mature social behaviors were differentially associated with the pretend context. A within-subjects design and a semistructured play setting were used to control for individual differences, child and environmental effects. Thirty-seven 4- and 5-year-old children were observed in groups of four for 47.5 minutes, in a series of play sessions. Their interactions within social pretend play and social nonpretend activities were observed and compared. The results indicated that during pretend play, children's social interactions were more enjoyable, lasted longer, involved larger groups, and showed more play involvement and greater reciprocity. The results substantiate prior theoretical and empirical work which high- lights the educational significance of social pretend play in early childhoood. Social pretend play appears to provide a contextual framework within which mature social interaction can occur and social competencies may be acquired.     

Understanding Teasing: Lessons From Children With Autism

Teasing requires the ability to understand intention, nonliteral communication, pretense, and social context. Children with autism experience difficulty with such skills, and consequently, are expected to have difficulty with teasing. To better understand teasing concepts and behaviors, children with autism, their parents, and age and Verbal-IQ-matched comparison children and parents described concepts and experiences of teasing and engaged in a parent–child teasing interaction. The teasing of children with autism was less playful and provocative and focused less on social norms than that of comparison children. Similarly, parents of children with autism teased in less playful ways. Scores on a theory of mind task accounted for several of the observed differences. Discussion focused on the importance of understanding social context and playful behavior during teasing.     

从假装到心理表征理论:假装认识训练的影响

研究探究假装情境及假装认识对幼儿心理理论(Theory of mind)发展的影响。实验一考察60名3~4岁幼儿在假装情境下的信念认识任务中的表现,发现幼儿对假装的早期认识的出现要早于对信念的认识的出现,假装情境对幼儿的信念认识没有直接促进作用。实验二对42名在信念认识任务上表现不佳的幼儿进行假装认识训练,结果发现假装认识训练促进了幼儿的信念认识,促进效应须经历一段时间才显现。研究支持假装认识在心理理论发展中具有重要作用的假设,但潜在作用机制仍有待进一步探究。