Pretend Play as Twin Earth: A Social-Cognitive Analysis

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“…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).…”

“…For instance, they say that pretending-as with counterfactual thinking-involves representing possible worlds (Weisberg, 2016). According to Angeline Lillard (2001), performing make-believe games serves a similar function for children, in some respects, as the Twin Earth construct serves for philosophers: it enables them to imagine and reason about an alternative world which resembles reality in some parameters. In other words, while pretending a 5 Here we see how the notion of counterfactual imagination is contrary to the famous view of imagination proposed by Kant (1781Kant ( /2000, who claimed that our imagination is completely free from reality: "For the imagination (as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it .…”

Histórias infantis: um recurso para a compreensão dos estados mentais

“…No plano internacional, alguns estudos fornecem subsídios que contribuem para a compreensão e promoção do desenvolvimento de uma teoria da mente na criança: conversações pais-filhos (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982;Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn, 1987), o número de irmãos (Perner, Ruffman, & Leekam, 1994), envolvimento em brincadeiras de faz-de-conta (Leslie, 1987;Lillard, 2001;Roazzi & Santana, 1999) e pesquisas no contexto educativo (Astington & Pelletier, 2000).…”

Metarepresentation and the great cognitive divide: A commentary on Henriques' “Psychology Defined”

“…Numerous cognitive scientists have discussed so-called decoupling skills-the mental abilities that allow us to mark a belief as a hypothetical state of the world rather than a real one (e.g., Carruthers, 2002;Cosmides & Tooby, 2000;Dienes & Perner, 1999;Glenberg, 1997;Jackendoff, 1996;Leslie, 1987;Lillard, 2001;Perner, 1991). Decoupling abilities prevent our representations of the real world from becoming confused with representations of imaginary situations that we create on a temporary basis to predict the effects of future actions or think about causal models of the world that are different from those we currently hold.…”