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The present study examined what makes an act a pretense one for adults and preschoolers. Participants watched pretense versus real acts, judged whether each act was pretend or real, and justified their judgment by citing the cues they used. These reported cues are presumed to reflect viewers' conception of what makes an act a pretense one. The results suggested that like adults, 5-year-olds represented pretense behavior in the form of contrasts between pretense and its real counterpart. However, children placed greater weight on deviant content than on behavioral cues, whereas adults used behavioral cues, especially movement, when content information was not available. These results are discussed in terms of how children's intuitive theories of pretense might differ from those of adults.

Many have thought that children have an early appreciation of the mind in the case of pretend play. Results from several experiments are against this. However, an experiment by Lillard (Body or mind: children's categorizing of pretense, Child Development, 67 (1996), 1717‐1734, Experiment 4) suggested that when a pretense is about a fantasy character, instead of a real entity, children might have a better understanding of the mind's involvement. The present experiment tested this, and found that indeed, when pretending to be a fantasy character is at issue, 4‐year‐olds are significantly more apt to indicate the mind's involvement. Several possible reasons for this result are discussed.

Abstract Mothers begin to pretend with their children during the second year, when children still have much to learn about the real world. Although it would be easy to confuse what is pretend with what is real, children at this young age often demonstrate comprehension during pretense situations. It is plausible that social referencing, in which the child uses the mother's emotional expression as a guide to behavior, might facilitate this emerging knowledge by signaling to the child not to take the pretend situation seriously. Data from 32 pairs of mothers and their 18‐month‐olds who had engaged in pretend and real snack behaviors were subjected to a sequential analysis to investigate a social referencing interpretation. Consistent with our hypothesis, behaviors suggestive of a baby's understanding pretense were more likely to follow a specific combination of behaviors consistent with social referencing than other combinations of behaviors. These results provide support for the possibility that children use information obtained through social referencing to assist understanding during pretense interactions.

AbstractMany 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.

AbstractPretend play is a quintessential activity of early childhood, and adults supply children with many toys to encourage it. Do young children actually prefer to pretend, or do they do it because they are unable to engage in some activities for real? Here we examined, for nine different activities, American middle‐class preschoolers' preferences for pretend and real activities. The 100 children we tested (M = 58.5 months, range 36 to 82 months) overwhelmingly preferred real activities to pretend ones, and this preference increased from age 3 to age 4, then remained steady through age 6. Children provided cogent justifications for their preferences. The results are discussed with reference to other domains in which children show reality preferences and with respect to the content of preschool curricula.

Adults adopt the traits of characters in narratives, but little is known about whether children do so. In Study 1, 7- and 10-year-olds (N=96) heard a 2.5-minute recording about a professor or cheerleader. Reporting higher engagement in the professor narrative related to more time playing with an analytical toy (a Rubik's cube), whereas reporting higher engagement in the cheerleader narrative related to less time playing with Rubik's cube. However, although children were randomly assigned to a narrative, within condition children may have had preexisting personality differences causing them both to become more engaged in that narrative and also to behave more like that character afterwards. To control for this possibility, in Study 2 children (N=104) were given perspective-taking or objective instructions. Interestingly, both instructions created higher engagement than in Study 1, resulting in main effects of narrative. Children in the professor condition, compared to those in the cheerleader condition, spent more time playing with Rubik's cube and self-reported higher levels of professor-relevant characteristics (e.g., smart, good at teaching). These studies show that, by the elementary school years and particularly when highly engaged in a narrative, children adopt the traits of a narrative's central character.

AbstractAll activities—real and pretend—provide children opportunities to learn new facts and skills, and parents are often facilitators. Yet little is known about whether and how parents' roles and interactions differ during pretend versus real activities. Here, we examine whether parents self‐report adopting different roles during pretend and real activities and whether we observe changes in their behavior, in particular in their question‐asking; either could impact the potential learning opportunities available to children. Thirty‐two parents engaged their 4‐year ‐olds in one pretend and one real activity (cleaning and snacking, counterbalanced). They self‐reported their roles, and speech was transcribed and coded. Parents regarded their role as a partner in fun during pretend and as a teacher or monitor during real activities. Across pretend and real contexts, they mostly asked information‐seeking questions, followed by rhetorical and pedagogical questions. They asked significantly more questions during pretend than real activities, particularly rhetorical questions. During real activities, parents' roles were not related to the number or types of questions they asked. However, during pretend, their roles were related to the number of rhetorical questions they asked: Monitors asked significantly fewer than teachers. Possible complementary benefits of each activity based on patterns of roles and questions are discussed.