Skip to content
Show Menu

Pretend Play Skills and the Child’s Theory of Mind

Pretend play has recently been of great interest to researchers studying children’s understanding of the mind. One reason for this interest is that pretense seems to require many of the same skills as mental state understanding, and these skills seem to emerge precociously in pretense. Pretend play might be a zone of proximal development, an activity in which children operate at a cognitive level higher than they operate at in nonpretense situations. Alternatively, pretend play might be fool’s gold, in that it might appear to be more sophisticated than it really is. This paper first discusses what pretend play is. It then investigates whether pretend play is an area of advanced understanding with reference to 3 skills that are implicated in both pretend play and a theory of mind: the ability to represent one object as two things at once, the ability to see one object as representing another, and the ability to represent mental representations.

Privacy Overview
PEDAL

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer generated when you visit a website and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These essential cookies do things like: remembering the notifications you've seen so we do not show them to you again or your progress through a form. They always need to be on.

3rd Party Cookies

We use a set of third party tools to provide information of how our users engage with our website so that we can improve the experience of the website for our users. For example, we collect information about which of our pages are most frequently visited, and by which types of users. We also use third-party cookies to help with performance.