Children's pretense: representing fictional worlds and relating them to reality

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In the early preschool years, children engage in pretend play and recognize and share in others' pretend play. These abilities are striking: Given that young children know so little about the world, we might expect them to focus on learning about how the world actually is. But in pretense, the opposite seems to happen--children intentionally misrepresent reality. This observation has led many to view pretense as an early form of counterfactual or fictional reasoning. The current proposal agrees with this analysis, but to a point. The relationship between pretense and children's representation of pretense and reality is complicated. In brief, much pretense is consistent with children's general knowledge. For instance, when pretending a block of wood is a car, a child will move the block so that its motion is reminiscent of a car's, and might make sounds ("vrrm") reminiscent of car sounds. Hence, children typically expect objects represented in pretense to retain their real-world properties. Because of this, children may often use shared pretense as a means of acquiring general knowledge. Hence, rather than just allowing children to distort reality, pretense may also allow children to learn about it. Exceptions to such learning should occur when children have evidence that pretense conflicts with their general knowledge, and is fantastic rather than realistic. It is possible, though, that children nonetheless draw generalizations from such pretense. For instance, if the child observes pretense in which two animals are made to speak, the child might infer that in this pretense OTHER animals can also speak. That is, pretense provides a context where children infer general rules governing fictional worlds. The proposed research examines these predictions by examining the inferences young preschoolers, after they watch another person pretend. Beyond increasing our understanding of how children represent and reason about pretense and fictional worlds, this research may also reveal that pretense is a long overlooked means by which children can acquire factual knowledge about the world.