The impact of fantasy and action on young children’s understanding of pretense

Theorists examining children’s understanding of the mind have been particularly interested in pretence as it may be a marker for early understanding of mental representation (Leslie, 1987). Although Lillard (1993a, 1996) found that children appeared not to understand that pretence involves mental representation or even the mind, Lillard and Sobel (1999) showed that for certain types of pretence, in particular, pretence involving fantasy characters, children’s understanding might be more advanced. The two experiments here replicate and extend this finding. In both experiments, children performed better on fantasy items than items that did not involve fantasy. This was true regardless of the amount of action the pretence involved. Researchers in early social cognition have been concerned withwhen children acquire an understanding of mental representation (Flavell &Miller, 1998). Many researchers have concluded that children acquire this capacity sometime during the fourth or fifth year, as acknowledged by their success on the now classic ‘false belief ’ task (Astington, Harris