The impact of fantasy and action on young children’s understanding of pretence

Theorists examining children’s understanding of the mind have been particularly interested in pretence as it may be a marker for early understanding of mental representation (Leslie, 1987). Although Lillard (1993a, 1996) found that children appeared not to understand that pretence involves mental representation or even the mind, Lillard and Sobel (1999) showed that for certain types of pretence, in particular, pretence involving fantasy characters, children’s understanding might be more advanced. The two experiments here replicate and extend this finding. In both experiments, children performed better on fantasy items than items that did not involve fantasy. This was true regardless of the amount of action the pretence involved.