Recently, there has been increased interest regarding how pretend play contributes to children’s cognitive development. This study examines the efficacy of a pretend play intervention on self-regulation and language skills of 4to 5-year-olds and explores parents’ perceptions about children’s engagement in pretend play. The small-scale intervention includes eight 30minute sessions over 6 weeks, ...

The literature surrounding the autistic child's social impairment is reviewed. It is proposed that an impairment in some aspect of autistic children 'a social cognition could account for many of the observed abnormalities in their social behaviour. First, t "lower-level" aspects of social cognition are considered. These are mirrcr self-recognition and perceptual role-taking. The present sample ...

Lillard et al. (2013) concluded that pretend play is not causally related to child outcomes and charged that the field is subject to a play ethos, whereby research is tainted by a bias to find positive effects of play on child development. In this commentary, we embrace their call for a more solidly scientific approach to questions in this important area of study while offering 2 critiques of t...

This article provides an overview of our ongoing research project to better understand and formally represent the sociocognitive processes employed in sociodramatic pretend play. Pretend play involves the collaborative cocreation and subsequent enactment of a narrative experience using physical objects. This paper describes our empirical study of human pretend play, including preliminary result...

Pretend play presents an interesting puzzle. Children generally must keep pretense separate from reality or else pretend would confuse their real-world representations. Children spend a great deal of time pretending, and so failing to take any information from pretend scenarios would present a lost opportunity; however, little research has investigated whether it is possible or efficient for ch...