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.
Joseph
R M
RM
Psychological Sciences Division, Shriver Center, Waltham, MA 02154, USA. rjoseph@shriver.org
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