Skip to content
Show Menu

Pretense and possibility—A theoretical proposal about the effects of pretend play on development: Comment on Lillard et al. (2013).

The review by Lillard et al. (2013) highlighted the need for additional research to better clarify the nature of the relationship between pretend play and development. However, the authors did not provide a proposal for how to structure the direction of this future work. Here, we provide a possible framework for generating additional research. This theoretical proposal is based on recent computational approaches to cognition, in which counterfactual reasoning plays a central role in causal learning. We propose that pretend play initially emerges as a product of the cognitive mechanisms underlying human learning and then feeds back to become critical for enhancing the optimal functioning of these same processes. More specifically, we argue that pretending is in fact 1 of several forms of counterfactual reasoning, which is essential to causal cognition—and that the act of engaging in pretend scenarios may provide early opportunities to practice the skills that were initially responsible for its appearance. Here, we provide a brief overview of this theoretical framework, consider how these ideas may be integrated with the previous work covered in Lillard et al.’s (2013) review, and suggest some empirically testable questions to direct future directions.

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.