Intention and knowledge in preschoolers' conception of pretend.
Experiments 1 and 2 investigated 3- and 4-year-olds' understanding of the intended nature of pretend behaviors by testing their ability to distinguish between involuntary behaviors and the same behaviors emitted intentionally through acts of pretend. Four-year-olds' high rate of passing showed that (1) they understood intention as a mental cause of action and (2) they construed pretend behaviors mentalistically. Experiment 3 used the same contrastive procedure to examine Lillard's contention that 4-year-olds do not understand the knowledge conditions and hence the mental representational component of pretend actions. Whereas nearly all of the 5-year-olds understood that an agent who did not know of a specific animal could not be pretending to be that animal, 4-year-olds systematically associated ignorance with pretend. On the basis of the combined findings of the present experiments, and other research showing a mentalistic understanding of pretense by the age of 3 or 4, it was concluded that the specific reasoning requirements of Lillard's tasks resulted in an underestimation of children's appreciation of the mental features of pretend.
Psychological Sciences Division, Shriver Center, Waltham, MA 02154, USA. rjoseph@shriver.org
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D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D008192:Deception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008128:Logic; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D010988:Play and Playthings / Q000523:psychology; D002666:Psychology, Child; D011936:Reality Testing; D012107:Research Design; D012938:Social Perception; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014836:Volition