The conceptual underpinnings of pretense: Pretending is not ‘behaving-as-if ’

The ability to engage in and recognize pretend play begins around 18 months. A major chal-lenge for theories of pretense is explaining how children are able to engage in pretense, and how they are able to recognize pretense in others. According to one major account, the metarepresenta-tional theory, young children possess both production and recognition abilities because they pos-sess the mental state concept, PRETEND. According to a more recent rival account, the Behavioral theory, young children are behaviorists about pretense, and only produce and recognize pretense as a sort of behavior – namely, behaving ‘as-if’. We review both the metarepresentational and Behavioral accounts and argue that the Behavioral theory fails to characterize very young chil-dren’s abilities to produce and to recognize pretense. Among other problems, the Behavioral the-ory implies that children should frequently mis-recognize regular behavior as pretense, while certain regular forms of pretend play should neither be produced nor recognized. Like other men-tal states, pretense eludes purely behavioral description. The metarepresentational theory does not suVer these problems and provides a better account of children’s pretense. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved