Children engage in pretend play from around 18 months of age, rarely confusing their “pretend” world with the “real” world. It has been recently suggested that various social cues and behavioural regularities presented by parents during their own pretend play enhance the ability of children to quarantine pretend acts from real acts. However, a question that has received little empirical investi...

This experimental study examined the relationship between pretend play and false-belief. Eighteen-month-old children engaged in pretend play with an experimenter using various controlled behaviors and performed a false-belief task. The results showed that the children who understood pretend play performed better on the false-belief task. This suggests that pretended play and false-belief are re...

Citation: Dore RA, Smith ED and Lillard AS (2015) How is theory of mind useful? Perhaps to enable social pretend play. It is often claimed that theory of mind (ToM) is facilitated by pretend play (PP), or by a particular type of PP, social pretend play (SPP). Here we challenge that view, proposing instead that ToM might be useful for driving SPP, rather than the reverse. We discuss background t...

OBJECTIVE Clinical writings on sensory integration treatment and theory have long professed that play serves as an important means of implementing treatment goals. However, to date, there has been little research that examines this aspect of the intervention. With the use of play language as an indicator for the occurrence of play, this study examined the frequency and characteristics associate...

The present study examined longitudinal relationships among early pretend play, divergent thinking, and academic achievement in school-age girls. Theoretically, processes in pretend play should relate to divergent thinking and academic achievement. The aim of the present study was to establish longitudinal correlates of pretend play in school-age girls. It was hypothesized that early measures o...

BACKGROUND There is a recent trend of a worldwide increase in the incidence of autistic spectrum disorder. Early identification and intervention have proved to be beneficial. The original version of the Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (CHAT) was a simple screening tool for identification of autistic children at 18 months of age in the United Kingdom. Children with an absence of joint attention...

Pretend play has recently been of great interest to researchers studying children's understanding of the mind. One reason for this interest is that pretense seems to require many of the same skills as mental state understanding, and these skills seem to emerge precociously in pretense. Pretend play might be a zone of proximal development, an activity in which children operate at a cognitive lev...