2015
DOI: 10.1002/wcs.1341
|View full text |Cite
|
Sign up to set email alerts
|

Pretend play

Abstract: Pretend play is a form of playful behavior that involves nonliteral action. Although on the surface this activity appears to be merely for fun, recent research has discovered that children's pretend play has connections to important cognitive and social skills, such as symbolic thinking, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning. The current article first defines pretend play and then reviews the arguments and evidence for these three connections. Pretend play has a nonliteral correspondence to reality, hen… Show more

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...
2
1
1
1

Citation Types

1
77
0
3

Year Published

2017
2017
2024
2024

Publication Types

Select...
6
1

Relationship

0
7

Authors

Journals

citations
Cited by 112 publications
(93 citation statements)
references
References 110 publications
1
77
0
3
Order By: Relevance
“…Studying children’s pretend play can also provide insight into human cognitive architecture and its development (Weisberg, 2015). …”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…Studying children’s pretend play can also provide insight into human cognitive architecture and its development (Weisberg, 2015). …”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Recent evidence indicates that pretend play has important connections to the development of cognitive, affective, and social skills (Pellegrini and Smith, 2005). These connections make pretend play an important phenomenon to study, due to its capacity to provide insight into children’s abilities and internal representations (Niec and Russ, 2002) and its appropriateness for investigating the “architecture” of the child’s mind (Weisberg, 2015). …”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Like language, pretend and symbolic play relies on the representational capacity to use a signifying entity to stand for another entity. It has connections to cognitive and social skills that are important for language development, such as symbolic thinking, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning …”
Section: Learning Complex Languages: the Role Of Playmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…It is said to appear very early in human development at the age of 18 months, when children start engaging in pretend play (Amsel & Smalley, 2000;Harris, 2000;Lillard, 2001;Weisberg, 2015). Moreover, counterfactual imagination is sometimes perceived as a particular evolutionary prec edent and as a potential explanation of the unique human cognitive attributes (De Smedt, 2011;Suddendorf, 2013).…”
Section: Counterfactual Imagination That Relies On Factsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Some researchers have recognized the counterfactual features of children's pretense episodes in a more explicit way (Amsel & Smalley, 2000;Harris, 2000;Weisberg, 2015;Weisberg & Gopnik, 2013). For instance, they say that pretending-as with counterfactual thinking-involves representing possible worlds (Weisberg, 2016).…”
Section: Counterfactual Imagination In Human Developmentmentioning
confidence: 99%