From the Vault: Pretend Play, Part 2

so forth. But as a brief refreshed or in part one, Rob and I talked about our own memories of pretend play from our own childhood, as well as our experiences of pretend to play as parents, especially centering out around the kind of play that happens in preschool age, you know, around three to five or so, which, according to the researchers is sort of the high season of pretend play when the most pretending is happening usually though, of course,

we also talked about the ways that play extends throughout the lifetime. Even pretend play, you know, it starts before

this period goes beyond it. But the preschool age is when the pretending is coming thick and fast, and we characterized what a lot of that play is, Like Robert, I don't remember if we ever got into this in the previous episode, but one thing I was reflecting on before we started today is not just how much my two year old daughter loves engaging in pretend play with you know, her various dinosaurs, kind of doing imaginary tasks and going to imaginary events things like that, but also

gets so dedicated to pretend play that like it is a tragedy and an emergency if she is asked to stop pretending before she's done.

So in the last episode we talked about the paper's discussion of the possible relationships of pretend play to symbolic understanding and also to counterfactual reasoning. Today, I want to return to another idea explored in this paper, and that is the relationship of pretend play to theory of mind. This is a concept that's come up on the show

many times. Before, but to define it again here, theory of mind is the ability to recognize that other entities, like other people and animals, have their own internal mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions. And theory of mind is also the understanding that other people's mental states are independent of one's own. So it's not that everybody is sad because I'm sad right now. The other people different things are happening in their minds. We are not

born with theory of mind skills. The ability to imagine and model the mental states of other people is something that is acquired and refined throughout childhood.

people's mental states as being just how people are. You know, we think we know them, but in reality, like the whether we're dealing with the closest relationships in your life, you know, a significant others, family members, offspring, and so forth, whether you're dealing with them or you're dealing with someone you just met on the street or didn't even meet

someone that was walking across the street from you. We we we create a simulation of their mind state of what they're roughly, their their goals, their attitudes towards us generally are, and and then we react to the to those models, and so it is. It is kind of interesting, kind of haunting to think about the fact that, like the you that I think I know best is actually

inside of me. Yes, you know. And and of course theory of mind can be trained on plenty of non human entities as well, on objects and on real things. Uh So it's a very powerful part of the human cognition tool chest.

just observed and taken literally. But if I'm a child and I see this happening, even without talking about the game, I can probably infer that my friend intends the crayons to be understood as food. You know, last time we talked about crayons as spaghetti, and thus intends the forklifting to be understood as feeding, and thus intends the inert

stuffed dinosaur to be understood as eating. So I can participate in this play by feeding the dinosaur spaghetti crayons as well, or by making nomnom sounds when the crayon reaches the dinosaur's mouth. And about this connection, Weisberg writes in the paper quote pretense is thus meta representational, meaning it involves representing someone's representation of a state of affairs. Without the ability to meta represent one would see pretense

actions as nonsensical, and quarantining would break down. And remember from last time, quarantining is the ability to stop yourself from taking inapplicable lessons from pretend play. So the example was mom is using a banana as a phone. Somehow we can play that pretend game and yet not take the incorrect lesson that you can actually make calls on a banana. It's the ability to ward off incorrect information and prevent your brain from learning things that are wrong

based on a game that is counterfactual. And so what Weisberg is saying here is that things like quarantining are only possible because we have this meta representational ability. Like you can see somebody playing the banana as phone game and you don't think that, oh, maybe the banana can place calls because you understand that person's intentions that they're just intending this to be a game, not intending to

use the banana literally as a phone. In my example, I guess the equivalent would be like, are we feeding the dinosaur crayons? Because crayons are actually food? Should I eat them? Sometimes a kid may experiment along these lines, but usually they do not end up at this conclusion. Usually the kid understands the intention of the play partner to treat the crayons as something other than what they actually are.

toy phone. But I would also think a banana as a phone is funnier than an apple as a phone.

the phone is dead serious or can be. The banana is stupid and therefore it just works.

person literally does, but understanding what that person intends. And Weisberg compares this to a common experiment that is used to test theory of mind in children, which he refers to as the Sally Ann false belief task, though or sometimes in the literature they just call this a false belief test. Here's a simplified version of it. Okay, the

child is a participant. The child watches a character playing with a ball, and then this character puts the ball down in a basket and walks out of the room. And then while the original character who is playing with the ball is gone, somebody else comes into the room, takes the ball out of the basket, hides it in a box, and then leaves. Then the first character comes back into the room, and the child has been watching

the whole time, so the child saw everything happen. When you ask the child a question, where will the original character look for the ball? So the child knows, because they were watching the whole time, that the ball is

hidden in the box. But with theory of mind skills, the child should be able to say that the character should look in the basket where she left it, because the child knows that the character does not know that the ball was moved or where it was moved too, So to answer this question correctly, the child in the experiment has to ignore their own knowledge about the true state of affairs and instead answer based on the false

belief that the character in the scenario would have. If you compare this to the pretend play scenario, if a kid wants to join in the crayons as spaghetti game with another child, they have to ignore the true knowledge that the crayons are crayons and that they are meant for drawing and not for eating, and also to infer the intentions of the play partner that the crayons are

to be treated as food for the dinosaur. So both of these situations, pretend play and the false belief test for theory of mind depend on at least two things

that Weisberg highlights. One of them is what she calls decoupling, and that is temporarily ignoring your knowledge of what is literally true, And the other is meta representation, internally representing somebody else's mental states, such as their intention to represent a literal object X as pretend object Y. So it's very tempting to see a link between theory of mind

and pretend play. Weisberg in fact cites a researcher named A. M. Leslie who has speculated in some writing that there is possibly an underlying neural structure in the brain that is responsible for both theory of mind and for pretending. Calling

this hypothetical structure the theory of mind module. Leslie apparently argued that perhaps a developmental difference in this neural structure is what underlies autism, given the observation that studies have found that children with autism spectrum diagnoses demonstrate deficits in social cognition, which implicates theory of mind, but also tend to engage in less pretending. But both the existence of this module and the connection with the autism spectrum is hypothetical.

What's clear is the cognitive and behavioral similarity between theory of mind and elements of pretend play. And then Weisberg goes on to site some studies that seem to support this link. I thought a couple of these were kind of interesting. One of them is by researchers named Rebecca Dore and Angeline Lillard, published in Imagination, Cognition, and Personality in twenty fifteen called Theory of Mind and Children's Engagement

in Fantasy Worlds. This was a study that looked at preschoolers at the beginning and then the end of a seven month period, and it tested for a few different things to see if there are any correlations. One was a child's tendency to engage in fantasy, ideation and activities, so this would be related to pretending basically a child's orientation toward fantasy. And then another thing measured was the

child's tendency to use mentalistic descriptions. I had to look up what this is, but I think this basically means, like, imagine you see a drawing of a character reaching a

bucket down into a pool of water. You could give a physical description of that scene, you know, the character is leaning down scooping up water, or you could give a mentalistic description, which might be something like this character wants a drink of water, explaining things in terms of motivations and mental states as opposed to just physical movements.

And then the third thing tested for correlation here was the child's capacity for theory of mind, which is tested a variety of ways, one of which is the false belief TAC that I was talking about a minute ago, but another is testing for whether children understand that different people have desires and emotions they're different from their own.

Things like that, and this study found that preschool children who are more oriented toward fantasy on a number of measures did not grow beyond the baseline in the use of mentalistic descriptions during the seven month period, but did show some greater improvements in theory of mind, so that establishes that there could possibly be a link between the tendency to engage in fantasy and faster learning on theory

of mind skills. Another finding is that some experiments have found that children do better on false belief tasks like the ball in the basket versus the box thing I was talking about when the format of the test involves more pretending. So think of when the scenario is presented as a fictional story or when it is acted out with invisible pretend and objects, as opposed to being acted out with literal physical props, in which case apparently the

kids do a bit worse. That kind of makes sense to me, Like, I guess it's harder to ignore your knowledge that the ball is actually in the box and remember that Sally left it in the basket and that's all she knows. When oh my god, like I just saw the ball go in the box. I literally saw it go in there. There It is also interesting is there are apparently some findings that suggest this is actually in adults, that reading fiction may possibly improve particular theory of mind skills.

It's really hard, maybe impossible, to devise an ethical, robust experiment where you like randomly manipulate the independent variable of pretend to play over a developmentally significant period of time and then track the results. Both ethics and practicality kind of limit us to weaker forms of testing in this subject matter. So we should be realistic and thus humble about the limitations of what we know about these links.

So what we know is very interesting, but it's also fairly tentative and important to not hang too much on these findings, especially the findings of a single study. But with those caveats, I think there's pretty good reason to think that pretending and theory of mind are deeply intertwined in some ways in the brain and in child development, but exactly how they are related, how one affects the other,

and so forth, is more questionable. Now. The kind of theory of mind that we have been primarily talking about, of course, is inferring the mental states of other people who do physically exist. But a different related question is what about simulating the workings of an external mind that is, at its base level make believe? And this brings us back to something we mentioned only briefly in Part one, the imaginary friend.

what an imaginary friend is. There are sort of related concepts that are sometimes looped together and sometimes are considered like, for instance, you have things like stuffed animals that are attributed personalities in some degree of agency. You also have personified objects, and you also have also sometimes there's a distinction between imaginary companions and imaginary friends. I'll come back to that in a bit, but I guess a good

place to start would be with examples from our own lives. Joe, did you have an imaginary friend? And does your child have an imaginary friend or friends?

into stuff, to animal friends, or imagining. We sometimes play this game with these invisible kitty cats and stuff that you know, we can find like hiding between the couch cushions and things, and we pull out an invisible kitty cat, and oh, and she can talk about what the kitty cat wants. But I think that's different than an imaginary friend, which is usually thought of as something that persists over time.

There could be several, and they need not be this sort of you know, standard version of some sort of essentially invisible friend, an invisible humanoid being that is like on the same level as as your child. And also they might just spring out of nowhere, as we'll get into a bit. But yeah, I myself have no memory of ever having an invisible friend, despite the fact that I was the oldest child and in many respects the eldest child that seemed to be more likely to have

an imaginary friend. My own child had being lost friends that I remember, and so I asked them about this, is like, do you remember your being lost friends? And they were like, no, I don't remember the being lost friends at all. I remember three imaginary cats that I had at one point. I'm like, okay, well I forgot about that. One. So that's another thing to keep in mind when you think about like single imaginary friends that a child may or may not have a lot of.

It also comes down to what memories are retained by the child and what is noticed and retained by the parents. And so it's entirely likely between those two things that old imaginary friends are lost entirely. So, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.

a child. Oh, and she was the eldest child. This would have been the I guess the early fifties, so that that'll be worth keeping in mind as we proceed through the discussion here.

of an imagined companion. They also discussed imaginary friends and personified objects as both being forms of imaginary companions, but stressed that a key difference one tends to find is that the relationship between child and personified object tends to be more more of a matter of like, these are my pets or you know, or these are my children. You know. It's a relationship that's mirroring human child and human pet relationships, while an imaginary friend is more egalitarian.

You don't tell them what to do because they're your friend. They're at least you're equal. It's not someone you boss, surround or care for. I want to add that into because I don't want to. I don't want to create this idea that you know, bossy kids just have these these underlings that are imaginary. It's like, you know, it could also be a care scenario and so forth, but the imaginary friend, it is more egalitarian in its nature.

So you know, bear that in mind as we move forward. Now, they briefly touch on the history of imaginary friends, with the study of them first popping up in eighteen ninety five with the work of Clara Vostrovsky A Study of Imaginary Companions. And yeah, but before this, there's like, there's basically nothing they were. For a while, following the emergence of study regarding them, they were often thought to be

signs of a personality dysfunction. The first book wasn't written about them unteen eighteen, and it wasn't until the nineteen sixties that imaginary friends were seen as a positive part of a child's development. This is universally so like, for instance, just going back to the example of my mother, like her parents embraced this idea and would like set places at the table for the seven imaginary children. So it's not a situation where it's like, oh, until the nineteen sixties,

imaginary friends were to be feared or anything. But just you know, broad strokes. Now, one question you might have is like, Okay, what does this mean. Does this mean that nobody had imaginary friends before the twentieth century? Well, that is actually one way you could look at it, and we'll get into that. But the other way is that clearly this is something that's just been going on since time out of mind, and it's only as we get into the twentieth century that it's being noticed and so forth.

going on with children. So, you know, did we care what children were talking about, did we care about if they had an imaginary friend or not, and so forth. On top of that, before the seventeenth century we deep ever deeper in of course, into the demon haunted world of superstition. So you know, if we did hear about our children talking with unseen entities, we probably had a script to go to that was not, oh well, they're

just engaging in pretend play. It might be more, oh well, they're talking to fairies, they're talking to spirits and so forth.

times now. They also bring up the idea that free play time and time alone are perhaps both key requirements for their emergence of an invisible companion and a child, and these would have been things that would have been, by some estimates, historically lacking and still lacking for children in many parts of the world and in many different

socioeconomic levels. You know, do you have time alone, do you have time to play in which you'd get to know your imagine in which you had been able to be able to generate this idea and play with it. They cite works from two thousand and three and nineteen seventy nine that reported a very low rate of reported invisible friends in India zero point two percent in one study, which is really low compared to some of the Western stats that I'll mention here in a bit, and they

attributed it to limited playtime and limited alone time. They also acknowledged that the idea of children remembering past lives is something that is sometimes explored and encouraged in parts of India, but that didn't seem to have an impact on the percentage rate of imaginary friends here. So they bring up this idea that in the past, and to some extent in the present, traditional ways of life throughout the world might not have allowed most children sufficient room

for not only imaginary friends, but even imagination play itself. Now. One of the sources they cite here on this is the work of Lloyd de Moss from nineteen seventy four, The History of Childhood, writing that quote, if pretend companions are indeed a modern phenomenon, then their genesis may result from being left alone and from having time available for play, customs that apply to contemporary Western children, but rarely to children historically. Now quick side note on de moss Here,

who lived nineteen thirty one through twenty twenty. He was a psychoanalyst and self proclaimed psychohistorian, and there remains some controversy about his work, and I've read some strong criticisms of his scholarship, especially concerning some of his more bombastic ideas. I'm not super well versed in his work, but at any rate, the key idea of his involved here is the notion that childhood in the modern Western sense is relatively new.

the last century or so. Or it could be that the very nature of childhood itself changes pretty drastically in different times and cultures, and this is something that emerges much more strongly in recent times in certain cultures.

here in a second. But another interesting idea they bring up is that while historical accounts of imaginary friends and children from before the twentieth century is scant and non existent, we have plenty of accounts of quote adult pretend companion like phenomena. This includes muses, household gods, guardian angels, and

personal saints. I'd also personally add ghosts and ancestor spirits to this, and I think it's something that many contemporary humans will also find themselves engaging with at least to some degree. You know, when we speak to the dead, and I don't mean even in like a daily regular fashion, but like if you visit somebody's grave and you speak to them, and on some level, you know, you were engaging with this mental model of their mind. You know,

what are you really speaking to it? You're speaking to this imaginary construct that person no longer exists in a physical form, you know. So, yeah, you are engaging in a very similar sort of pretend play. But we think of it differently, you know, we have a different We have an adult mindset regarding it, and so we don't loop it in, we don't lump it into the same category with the imaginary friends. Usually. Now, in this meta analysis, they point out that numerous studies have made a case

for invisible friends and invisible companions. I'm sorry, imaginary friends and imaginary companions, but they're often invisible having a beneficial effect on a child's social, emotion, emotional, and cognitive development. Just a few of the possible attributed benefits in the meta analysis include children with ices or imaginary companions may

have more developed sociocognitive and narrative skills. Children with ices may go on to have better coping competence as adolescents, that is, better coping strategies and techniques when faced with anxiety, such as reaching out for help or advice when they need it.

in your own situation. Even as an adult. You might not have another person, you imagine, but you sort of do need to be able to ask and answer questions within yourself or to set up oppositional viewpoints within your own head in order to sort of stand outside yourself and see what's going on.

it's it's interesting to think about here. Now, one thing they point out, and this is a huge factor, and this, of course is often a factor in studies. Is that is that pretty much all of our scholarship on ICs has come out of Western culture, where there is generally a majority of children with ICs of one sort or another. And so you have to ask, and again this is you know, this is a problem in other studies as well, obviously scientific and otherwise, like what's your your sample consists of?

Is it a bunch of you know, western college students, Is it a bunch of white Western college students and so forth? Then how does that break down when you're actually considering the species as a whole, And so, you know, you can you can ask yourself, well, how much of this is purely cultural then? And it's hard to say, they point out because at the time, at any rate, they said they had virtually nothing outside of Western culture

to compare these studies to. And I think this has changed a little bit since the publication date, but I think a lot of big questions remain. They did point to some Japanese studies at the time, however, and these seem to suggest that imaginary companions might be less common in Japanese children, apparently due to cultural reasons, though the rate was still something like fifty percent, So it's so it's just that's compared to sixty to sixty five percent

rate in studies of Western children. So you know, it's a sizable difference, but you're still looking at fifty percent.

Obviously there's a great deal to unravel there. In their meta analysis, they further elaborate the cultural attitudes towards imaginary friends are likely important here in Japan, for instance, they said there was at the time less common knowledge of the concept and perhaps more of a likelihood for imaginary friend reports from a child to generate a Prindal concern, despite, to be clear, a strong support for pretend play in

general in said culture. So, yeah, it gets complex trying to tease a part like, well, how much of it is a cultural factor, how much of it is just parents paying attention and so forth. So they summarize quote, imaginative and pretend play maybe universal behaviors across cultures with an evolutionary origin, but how the play is constructed in shape varies across culture is unclear. Now, other factors that seem to impact things. These include the children's age, the

assessment method, sex, and birth order. So on the subject of age. Looking at various studies involving imaginary friends, some studies identify two to three and a half as the peak age for imaginary companions, while others have identified age four. Some studies, they argue, do not distinguish between current and past imaginary companions, and I think that's interesting to think of as well. I honestly do not remember at what age my child had been wasp friends, but clearly there

was a window for it. You know.

less of the details. However, while the children themselves may be the best source, there are also complications there as well. They point out that below age three, a child may not have the verbal skills to answer all of the questions that the researchers have about the imaginary friends, and they may wind up answering questions by invoking real life friends instead, Like you're asking them about imaginary friends, but they're answering, they get confused out whether you're talking about

imaginary friends or real friends. And then I found this particularly funny. They may make up new imaginary friends during the interview.

at the drop of a hat. So many studies therefore focused on both children and parents, and then compare the notes also key sex and birth order on the birth order side of thing, firstborns and presumably singletons are most likely to have imaginary friends something like two point eight times more likely in the meta analysis, presumably because they lack for true childhood companions or more likely to lack

for true childhood companions within the household. On the sex side of the conundrum, there's a lot of work to work out here as well, and what we do have it tends to entail a lot of gender norms. Additionally, it's possible that there are different prime ages for imaginary friends between boys and girls, and not every study reports

sex differences anyway. Now, I want to get into a more specific question that came up for me on this topic, and it came up because it's the title of a paper I ran across from twenty twelve published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion by Jay Bradley Weiger, Katrina Paxson, and Lacy Ryan, What do invisible friends Know? And this of course leans heavily into questions of theory of mind. Ah, yeah, it all comes back in this study.

The author's question thirty six children ages two through eight with imaginary friends at the time, on what sorts of things their imaginary companions knew essentially on a sliding scale, with dog at one end and God at the other,

and humanity, you know, somewhere in the middle. And they found that younger children attributed knowledge to all agents considered here, while older children treated God differently from all the others, but that imaginary friends, the imaginary friend was also different from either human or dog. In other words, it kind of stands as this in between character. And I was thinking about this and I realized, you know, it kind of reminded me of the nineteen eighty eight film My

Neighbor Totoro by Hyo Miyazaki. In this, if you haven't seen it, two young girls in the Japanese countryside encounter friends nature spirits in the form of Toto's as well as a cat bus. And it does not expressly deal with them as imaginary friends. But if we were to think of the Totos as imaginary friends, you know, what, did they seem to know? What is their mindset? They do not seem to have the mind of an all

knowing or all seeing God. They don't really talk. They are certainly in many ways like animals, but they're clearly not animals either. Wild or domestic. They're also not people, and they're not to invoke another Miyazaki creature. They're not like Kiki's feline companion Jiji in Kiki's delivery Service, who is a cat who speaks with the human voice. The totos seem to have their own category, much like what we're discussing here.

So in one of the theory of mind tasks, the children had what is called an occluded picture study. So you can think of it this way. You have a full picture inside of a folder, like a folding folder, and then there's a little window cut in the folder so that you just get a little sliver of the full picture, and then you ask the child, can you guess what the full picture is? And the children were very confident, something like sixty three percent of them said

that they knew what the whole picture was. They're like, oh, yeah, I know what it is, and they made wild guesses. They didn't none of them got it. But that's not really the point here. It's about what they thought they knew. But here's where it gets interesting. Fifty three percent said that their best friend, this is like a real person would know what the picture was as well, So that's less so sixty three for them, fifty three percent for

their friends. Forty four percent said a dog would know, and ninety percent said that God would know, and the imaginary friend sixty seven percent. So imaginary friends were quote slightly more likely to know than everyone except God.

the way things are. Anything, everything is nested, there is always more, and so It goes on to praise the resiliency of a child's mind when presented with the awareness of more. You know, like their understanding of the world is continually challenged, corrected, and expanded upon. And you know, when he was pointing this out in the book, it's like I was like, yeah, like that's the kind of thing that most stubborn adults, it would just break them.

Most adults are too stubborn too, I feel like to really learn much, at least in certain areas of their life. But like, that is what childhood is. It's constantly being finding out that, oh I didn't understand this, and now I have a broader understanding of what it is, but still being confident enough to think, you know what the picture is. You know, it's like a special kind of optimism.

influenced things, at least not in what I read. But instead they stress that while they were all likely told to some degree what God knows and sees, they were left to their own devices to figure out what their imaginary friend would know. And this is where the author shares some interesting ideas quote perhaps their invisibility itself is important. The physicality of humans and dogs is what creates limits

in perspective and knowledge. At least the older children might reason, perhaps invisible figures enjoy the privileges of not being so limited because they don't have ordinary bodies.

of a Christian God in all of this. You know, you consider such notions as the Evil Eye, which in some traditions is held to be this manevolent force that will hear you if you boast of your blessings to low, it will seek you out and curse you. You know, invisible, its powers of detection seem rather boundless, such that you

choose your words carefully in every instance. And you know, there are similar concepts as well of Santa Claus, though not invisible, and does kind of take on this sort of invisible status outside of Christmas Eve itself, right, and you're told that he sees all you know, He's like the eye of Providence, always watching, all seeing, all knowing.

you're not really sure. When we have these very concrete superpowered characters like the X Men, you know, so like they have physical bodies and they have powers beyond normal human powers, but also they're clearly limited in all normal human capacities apart from their special powers.

about it. But but yeah, this idea of invisibility uh or disembodiedness, having the h the effect of greater knowledge it's and and being closer to the divine is fascinating as well as this idea that it like it represents a tendency uh in the human psyche to to like lean into these ideas of the unseen world, and uh and so yeah, it makes you wonder it's like when when children are engaging in imaginary companions and imaginary friends, Like, is this sort of like the raw creative energy that

later on in life is used to foster and generate you know, religious ideas and so forth, superstitions and and you know, in any of these other examples we mentioned earlier that are prevalent in adult life to varying degrees, muses, angels, deceased loved ones and so forth.

level of understanding this is not a person. But then it becomes real to us because we're kind of hardwired to do that.

does that mean? And should we be nice to them? And I think the general wisdom here is yes, you should be you should be nice to them for a variety of reasons, if for no other reason, like you really need one other thing in your life to be kind of like rude to and yell at like No, there's probably a better channel for that energy.

at AI. This is something that Jonathan Burch brought up. It's eventually, by many estimates, the AI models that we're interacting with will become sentient, and we won't necessarily be

able to tell when that occurs. So there will be if someone is just like one hundred percent rude to all AI computer chatbots and so forth, Google homes and what have you, and they just stuck to that at one point, at some point, possibly they're going to be rude to a sentient being that humans have created and like and that you know, crosses over into a different level of rudeness and meanness and what have you.

get into in a future listener male installment. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcasts, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.