Pretend play presents an interesting puzzle. Children generally must keep pretense
separate from reality or else pretend would confuse their real-world representations …

Children can acquire generic knowledge by sharing in pretend play with more
knowledgeable partners. We report 3 experiments in which we investigated how this …

Pretend play is often considered to be an imaginative or creative activity. Yet past
experimental research has focused on whether children imitate pretense, follow instructions …

We compared 1-and 2-year-old children's performance on Pretend and Reality tasks.
Pretend tasks involved the comprehension of a pretend scenario, whereas Reality tasks did …

We report two experiments investigating how 3-to 5-year-olds learn general knowledge from
pretend play—how they learn about kinds of things (eg, information about dogs) from …

Research suggests that children can learn new information via pretense. However, a
fundamental problem with existing studies is that children are passive receivers of the …

Pretend play begins very early in human life. A key question is why, when figuring out reality
is young children's major developmental task, they engage in its deliberate falsification. A …

A growing body of research demonstrates that children's pretend play is largely influenced
by their understanding of reality. The current work took a novel approach to testing children's …

We report evidence that children believe that pretend objects and entities should normally
be represented as having their factual properties, and that pretense ought not contradict …

Researchers studying early social cognition have been particularly interested in pretend
play and have obtained evidence indicating that young children do not understand that …