Kindergarten and Grade 1 children, half frequent pretenders and half infrequent pretenders, were observed playing in dyads. Negotiation of pretend plans (BN) preceded social pretend enactment (BSP) with greater than chance frequency for all groups. Frequent pretenders had more predictable pathways to BSP and fewer predictable exit behaviors. BSP and nonpretend social activity (BSL) formed distinct spheres of play activity. The complexity of social interaction increased sooner after BSP onset than after BSL onset, supporting the importance of social pretend play for the practice of social skills.This research was conducted with the support of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Conseil Quebecois pour la Recherche Sociale, and the Quebec Fonds pour la Formation des Chercheurs et lXide a la Recherche to Anna Beth Doyle. We are grateful to Jennifer Connolly for suggesting the examination of sequential relations between play, affect, and social complexity, and to anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

The relation of social class differences in the social pretend play of five- to seven-year-old children to their cognitive skills was examined. The amount and symbolic features of social pretend play were noted in small-group freeplay sessions. Conservation, verbal symbol substitution, and role-playing skills were assessed individually as measures of cognitive symbolic skill. Middle class children engaged in more social pretend play, their pretend episodes lasted longer, and their conservation and verbal symbol substitution skills were greater. However, amount and duration of social pretend play were unrelated to conservation and verbal symbolic skills, and on the whole did not increase with age. These results provide no evidence that social class differences in social pretend play in the late preschool and early elementary school years reflect differing cognitive abilities, and have implications for pretend play training studies at this age.

The field of "digital humanities" is about using the latest digital methodologies in order to tackle humanities disciplines and social sciences questions. The ARCHIVES project belongs to this new research area. It proposes a methodology to build agent-based models of historical events, in particular crisis events, in order to answer new questions about them or explore them in new ways. In this paper, we present the first implementation of ARCHIVES on the case study of the management of floods in Hà Nội (Việt Nam) in 1926. We show how we collected, digitized and indexed numerous historical documents from various sources, built a historical geographic information system to represent the environment and flooding events and finally designed an agent-based model of human activities in this reconstructed environment. We then show how this model helped us understanding the decisions made by the different actors during this event, testing multiple scenarios and answering several questions concerning the management of the flooding events.

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