The review by Lillard et al. (2013) highlighted the need for additional research to better clarify the nature of the relationship between pretend play and development. However, the authors did not provide a proposal for how to structure the direction of this future work. Here, we provide a possible framework for generating additional research. This theoretical proposal is based on recent comput...

LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 61, No. 4, 2013 (“The Impact of Gaming on Libraries,” edited by Scott Nicholson), pp. 836–848. © 2013 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Abstract Play is a well-documented educational tool, but one that has begun to decline in schools and early childhood education due to the increased pressure for cognitive-based school readiness programs. Play such as pretend pl...

In our article (Weisberg & Gopnik, 2013), we construct a unifying theory of imaginative processes, in which counterfactuals and pretend games share an underlying cognitive capacity. This theory allows us to explain why children pretend, why they create fantastical pretend worlds, and how pretend play and counterfactual reasoning can help children to learn about the causal structure of reality. ...

BACKGROUND Emerging empirical evidence suggests exposure to "green" environments may encourage higher levels of physical activity among children. Few studies, however, have explored this association exclusively in pre-school aged children in the United States. We examined whether residing in neighborhoods with higher levels of greenness was associated with higher levels of outdoor physical acti...

Theoretical analyses of the development of numerical representations suggest that playing linear number board games should enhance young children's numerical knowledge. Consistent with this prediction, playing such a game for roughly 1 hr increased low-income preschoolers' (mean age = 5.4 years) proficiency on 4 diverse numerical tasks: numerical magnitude comparison, number line estimation, co...

The numerical knowledge of children from low-income backgrounds trails behind that of peers from middle-income backgrounds even before the children enter school. This gap may reflect differing prior experience with informal numerical activities, such as numerical board games. Experiment 1 indicated that the numerical magnitude knowledge of preschoolers from low-income families lagged behind tha...

Background The healthcare setting is stressful for many people, especially children. Efforts are needed to mitigate children’s healthcare-related anxiety. Medical play using the Teddy Bear Hospital (TBH) concept can expose children settings and help them develop positive experiences in these settings. In this role-playing game, bring their soft toys act as parents ‘sick’ teddies a pretend hospi...

Competing theoretical accounts of psychopathological development in individuals with autism emphasize the role of different infant social, cognitive and affective factors, including affective responsivity, pretend play, joint attention and imitation. However, due to the fact that autism is rarely diagnosed before the age of three, until now these abilities have only been studied with school-age...