Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going to begin a series of episodes looking at the topic of pretend play. And yes, folks, this is one of my baby Looked at You topics, inspired directly by watching my currently two year old daughter's wonderful and frightening brain become ever more powerful day by day. Lately, she has been all about pretending. Sometimes it is pretending to be things. Robert, I can't remember if I told
you about the Christmas Elf. Do you know the Christmas Elf?
Do I know the Christmas self? Well, there are many elves.
This is different than the one on the shelf. This is so my daughter pretends to be this thing called the Christmas Elf, which mostly just like makes a grotesque kind of gargoyle face and dances wildly to black Sabbath. That's what Christmas elf is.
Okay, well, you're bringing her up right then. That seems that seems more in keeping with some of the more archaic forms of elf that we've discussed on the show.
Yeah, I don't know. Knowing me, that may sound like a trained behavior, but this is just what naturally emerged from her. I don't know where she got that. That's what Christmas elf is. She's like data put on Black
Sabbath record, but it runs around, dance into that. And then one of the good pretending to be things the other day was she was she's been playing with some little little doggies that she got for Christmas, little doggie toys, and one of them is a bagle, so she you know, she likes talking about the beagle and hearing about the beagle. But she was talking to Rachel the other day and she I think she was saying wolf wolf and Rachel said, oh, are you a beagle right now? And she said, no,
tater tot. Very still, I don't know what exactly are the properties one mimics when being a tater Todd that I can't fully inhabit that mindset, but I admire the ambition.
Well, I guess it is of the various fried and or baked potato food products. So it's the tater tots are the most canine of the bunch, So sure, yeah.
But a lot of it is. So there's a little bit of pretending to be things. But a lot more of it is what when we get into the research later in this episode, is what is sometimes called replica play. It is pretending with the aid of toys or props, little agent toys, and making them pretend to do things. So she's got a bunch of dinosaurs, and she loves to make her dinosaurs go night night, and then rapidly wake up and then go night night again, over and
over in like a mind rendingly fast circadian rhythm. She loves to have our little dinosaurs and creatures eat pizza. And there's a lot of discussion of to what extent there's sharing the pizza or not, or to what extent they're keeping pieces of pizza to themselves. Sometimes they're eating things that you can see there's like a physical prop for the food. Sometimes they're just eating purely imagine everything.
So there's cake there that's invisible cake. And then the past few days she's been into going on a boat on the couch, which is a book on the couch cushion. The couch cushion is the water and the book is the boat, and she puts various things on the boat and they get on and off the boat and see things out on the water, and typically they're on a boat trip to grandparents' house.
Wow. Yeah, it's a magical time. My own child is twelve going on thirteen now, so a lot of these really awesome examples of imagination play are in the past now, but my wife and I certainly look back on them with a lot of funness, and some of them are still things we frequently discuss in our you know, day to day conversations, even a reference rather. But yeah, I remember, I remember various antics with these, like old plastic dinosaur toys from my childhood, and so those would eat those
dinosaurs were always eating things. I can't remember how much of it was real, how much of it was imagined. And they wouldn't so much go to sleep as they would occasionally go extinct. There was some sort of a cosmic event that would make them all go extinct, but you know then they'd be back up and running before too long.
That's intense pretend. Yeah, yeah, facing the realities of nature head on.
Well, you know, you tell the story of the dinosaurs, you gotta tell the beginning, the middle of the end.
Yeah. Look, ma, these are evolving into birds.
Yeah, that's right. Well, we did touch on that aspect of it too, but we also inevitably or I inevitably ended up sort of busting out these sort of childhood version of dinosaurs that I had growing up, which was less about the bird thing and more about just catastrophic
fireballs and so forth and exploding volcanoes. We've referenced before that, like almost all of those old paleo art paleo art examples from childhood dinosaur books of like the late seventies and the nineteen eighties, they all had an erupting volcano in the background, so.
It's actively erupting at the moment.
And it was kind of implied or I always thought like, that's the end back there. It's what's happening. It's the end of days for the dinosaurs.
I think it's important to get both visions. Yeah, you know, you get the long scale evolutionary EON's point of view, and then you also get the scary part of fantasia of you.
Yeah. Well, I'm excited about these episodes though, getting into imagination play. It's a topic that you know, I think we've touched on before on the show, at least in passing. There may be some very old episodes that deal with some of the issues we're going to bring up here, But it's going to be nice to really dive into all of this.
A new yeah, And I'm not sure yet how many episodes we're going to go to in this series. We're looking at least two, but maybe three or more if the topic takes us there. But this is a rich subject. There's a lot of scientific research in this area, but also just a lot of interesting philosophical thought going back centuries. So there's going to be a lot to get into.
But I thought a good place to start would just be a good broad sort of overview paper looking at the subject from a psychology, cognitive science, and child development
point of view. And I found a good paper in that regard by Dina Skolnik Weisberg, published in the journal Cognitive Science in twenty fifteen called Pretend Play and so, Rob, if you're ready, I thought we should just go ahead and dive right into this paper and talk about some of the topics brought up in it, some of the research covered, and then we can branch out from there.
All right, let's do it.
So we start with definitions. Weisberg defines pretend play as any playful behavior that involves non literal action, so to paraphrase, play that operates on the premise of a thing or situation being other than what it literally is. So there are types of play that are not pretend to play. You can think of a game of tag or a
game of kickball. This is clearly play, but it's not really pretend to play because what you're I mean, you could imagine versions that involve pretend elements, but at the baseline, this is a game that is taken literally. What the children mostly think they're doing is playing the literal game.
Yeah, yeah, like a game of kickball is just a game of kickball unless you do what I do distinctly remember doing when I was a kid, is pretending that kickball with some sort of like sci fi gladiatorial combats anario, you know, and imagine kids are probably doing some molre things today, like imagining it's squid games, and so I guess it depends on the age, but you know, dreaming it up a little bit, adding that layer of imagination on top of it.
I recall specifically doing this with tag because I enjoyed playing tag a lot, and my friends and I in elementary school age played tag, but I remember I would spice it up mentally, sometimes with the cooperation of others or maybe just in my own mind, by imagining myself and other players as characters from movies I liked in the context of tag. So like, I just saw the movie Anaconda starring Ice Cube and Jenni Phi Lopez, you know, and and I am now pretending to be this character
from Anaconda as we play tag. You know, I was probably that was probably too mature of a movie for me at that point.
But we need to come back to Anaconda on a weirdest cinema.
By the way, it's it's so good, one of the most unhinged performances of all time John Voyd in that movie.
All right, right, so I think everybody gets where we're going with this. Yeah, it's like there's like basically like pure sport is not imaginative.
And then there are other kinds of play that once again could break down either way. So building with blocks could be pretend to play on how you're playing, but it isn't necessarily you might just be building with blocks. And so sometimes when I build with blocks with my daughter, the impression I get is that it's just about building with blocks. You know, she wants to build a big tower,
make a bunch of blocks. But if you think about it as we are building a skyscraper and there are going to be people living inside it and so forth, then I guess it is pretend play.
Yeah, Like you get into some of the bigger kid uses of Legos. For example, I remember doing this, and I've seen my child do this as well, where you are really almost creating an imaginative fetish item out of the out of the blocks. You know, it's some sort of a character or a creature or you know, in my case it was often some sort of a robot or a mech suit, you know, whatever the case may be. And it is about connecting blocks together and building something,
making a form. But then you were like filling that form with more meaning via your imagination.
Yeah, exactly. But okay, so here's where like clear pretend play comes in. When my child picks up an old DVD player remote control that we took the batteries out of and holds it up to her ear and says that she is calling her grandmother on the phone, that's definitely pretend to play. At some level, she knows the remote is not a phone, and you know, Nana does not talk back to her, but she likes to pretend and thinks it's very funny.
Yes, yes, my child also did a lot of phone pretend play as well, picking up various items, remote controls, blocks, what have you, pretending their phones.
So that's a pretty clear case. Coming back to more ambiguous cases. Oh, one that I think is huge is like play fighting. Play fighting could be non pretend to play. It could be understood as just literally a form of kind of free form wrestling competition between children or kids engaging in play fighting might be assuming the non literal form of characters and a scenario.
Yeah, my mind here instantly goes to lightsaber fighting because my own child did a lot of this and it took different forms. Right, Because if you're gonna pretend to fight with lightsabers, you can have a full like official lightsaber toy with an extendable plastic cone that serves as the blade of the lightsaber or laser sort if you will.
And but then you then you can have just a pre made hilt that you're pretending there is a light blade emanating from you can do what my child did and take foil like roll of foil, roll of saran wrap tubes, little cardboard tubes, dress those up as lightsaber hilts, and then you're fighting with those, pretending again that the
blade is there. Or you can do what I think a lot of kids do, is you just pretend the hilt is there as well, so I can draw a lightsaber right now and just go and you know, you know exactly what I have in my hand, and you can engage in battles, and so they are like different levels of having any kind of like actual physical property there to play off off.
Yeah, that's right. So you can imagine there's sort of different levels of extension of the imagination depending on what physical props you're using, or how far away the situation or scenario or object you're imagining is from the physical reality. So you know, there's a sort of greater imaginative leap involved in taking a paper towel tube and saying that's a lightsaber than holding like a toy painted up to look like a real lightsaber and saying that's a real lightsaber.
Both involve some imagination, but one kind of is a bigger leap and then it's even a bigger leap to take nothing at all. Just you know, you're completely imagining the presence of a prop in any case, and say that's the lightsaber.
And then is it me with the lightsaber to your point? Or am i obi wan? Am i anakin? Yeah? And so forth. So yeah, there's so many different levels of the imagination to employ here.
So the purpose of this review by Weisberg was to define pretend play, to differentiate it from other types of playful activities, and then to kind of look at ways that pretend to play fits into the development of various
cognitive and social skills in childhood. And since pretend play seems to involve many of the same mental structures as complex adult capacities like counterfactual reasoning, theory of mind, symbolic understanding, and so forth, looking at pretend to play really could help us better understand many aspects of the brain and the mind. So this review in particular looks at the relationship between pretend play and symbolic understanding, theory of mind,
and counterfactual reasoning. I think we might save at least one of those. I think the deeper exploration of theory of mind for part two, because that gets into a lot of other stuff. But I'm going to try to talk about symbolic understanding and counterfactual reasoning today. But the author kicks things off by trying to define and characterize pretend to play itself. Now, even going back a step, not just pretend to play, but play as a concept,
has proven notoriously difficult for researchers. There's like a whole literature arguing over what play is, what definition best captures the essence of play, What do we mean when we call something play, Which types of edge cases count and which do not. So play is just extremely variable from child to child, across different cultures. Different people look at the same activity and say that is play. No, that's
not play. So there's really no way to draw a clean boundary around this concept that everybody's going to accept. You will just have to sit with the fact that some people are going to say, no, I don't agree that that's what play.
Is, right, And this is going to kind of continue through our whole analysis of pretend play, because there's going to be a lot of going back and forth. Well, while some researchers say this classifies as such and such and others disagree. Yeah, it just depends how you tease it apart.
Yes, that's certainly the case. I mean, we are in the higher order sciences. We're more in the realm of psychology and cognitive science and a lot of things. They're just not as clean as they are in chemistry. Now, one of the main criteria that seems to be common to definitions of play is that it is what Weisberg calls non instrumental activity, meaning it has no immediate goal or purpose other than enjoyment. So you might actually enjoy something that is not play. Maybe you enjoy splitting logs
into firewood. But even if you do, most people would not think of splitting wood as play because it has an immediate functional goal. It's about transforming resources into a more usable form. So even if I don't know, you bring a spirit of playfulness to your log splitting and you really enjoyed the activity, most people don't look at that and say that is play.
This is really interesting to think about this distinction, because you know, I catch myself as what I like to think is a pretty pro play adult, rationalizing that some of my hobbies like many painting, for instance, rationalizing it on the basis that, well, this is going to result in something that can be utilized in another activity, generally a social activity, and therefore it's not like there's not this huge sunk cost to it, you know, it's not a big waste of time, which you know, there's a
lot of false thinking and all of that, I think. And likewise, yeah, you know, I've often thought about, or at least I've thought about this more over the last ten years or so, about how, you know, especially in a very capitalist society, I think a lot of us end up buying into this corrupting notion that if we're good at some thing, if we or even if we just enjoy something, if it brings us pleasure, well, then shouldn't we be generating some profits off of our love
or our talent or what have you? You know, And I should add the caveat you know, and there's nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with turning your passion, your hobby, your talent into a career or a side hustle making a few bucks off of it here and there, even if you're just sort of paying for part of that hobby. Certainly, yeah, go wild. But we should also feel free to play without having to deal with this inner voice saying, well, you're not good enough at it unless you can somehow
transition that fun over into a profit. You know that that any time spent having fun, anytime spent playing, is like just wasted time. You know, it's okay to engage in passions that pay only in fun, you know, or maybe socialization. And this is a huge one for me too, that I distinctly remember somebody sharing this with me several years back, that you know, it's okay not to be
perfect at your passions and hobbies. You know, I think a lot of times, like without even thinking about, without even rationalizing that like out loud in our or or you know, at a higher level of consciousness, you know, we still sort of buy into this idea that it's like, well, I'm a grown up. If I'm doing if I'm engaging in play, well then can I turn this into a business?
Can I make it? You know? Can I somehow rationalize it through the almighty dollar so that that ends up being how far removed we are, as often are as adults from like the pure childhood essence of play.
Yeah, I fully agree with all that. In fact, you know, people you may have heard some version of this advice before. But I would go against the grain with with people who say, you know, find a way to get paid for doing what you love, or you know, it's like, take your passion and turn that into a job, because that may mean that every day you get to do what you love, or it may mean that what is something that you used to love just gets turned into a chore.
Yeah. Yeah, and you know, certainly you hear stories about people who seem perfectly content with turning their passion into their job. But you also hear plenty of stories about people who have the reverse situation, or the thing that you still love has now become the thing they have to do every day.
So yeah, I guess nobody can figure it out for you whether that's going to be true in your case or not. So you'll just have to experiment, but be aware that that does happen.
But this is not a problem that the children.
Have correct though. I do want to stress while we're here that though we most often associate play with childhood, I think I've said on the show before that I think play is the work of childhood. When children are playing, they're doing their job. It does extend through the entire lifespan. I mean, it's clear that even adults going all throughout the lifetime engage in different types of play. There are games, there's word play, construction play, role playing of various kinds.
So you know it doesn't stop after childhood, but clearly childhood is the most intensive period of play in life. Now, pretend play specifically has an extended definition that takes it beyond just play generally, and Weisberg summarizes it as follows quote, pretend play crucially involves some form of representation or acting as if such that the behaviors or actions that take place in a pretend game are not meant to literally
reflect reality. So there is some extent to which what happens in pretend play is understood by the people playing to not be literally real. Now, there are a lot of different types of pretend play, and I got interested in the taxonomy of these play These almost like family trees of play type. And one that is very familiar to most people is object substitution pretend. This is treating one object as if it were another. So we already
mentioned the remote control is a telephone. It can't actually place calls, but you hold it up to your head, you say hello, you say ring ring, you pretend to call your grandmother whatever.
Another one that I have to mention is, of course stick is a gun. This one. I remember encountering this one a lot on the playground. Generally, you'd have like one group of children in my recollection, you know, playing peacefully, doing something cute, and then here come another band of children and they have sticks, and then they start firing sticks as if they are guns. Always a hot discussion on parenting forums. So get ready for that one, Joe.
Yeah, I know that's coming. But at the same time, I don't want I mean, I'm not thrilled about the idea of sticks as guns. But at the same time, I don't want to totally demonize conflict play. I mean, I think there's probably some healthy amount of kind of you know, the non bullying forms of kind of play fighting and stuff that can be okay. But there's also like a you know, a caretaking play, you know, treating the treating the little plastic dinosaur as a baby.
Yeah, exactly. Often a lot of I remember, a lot of food preparation and foraging play.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. In fact, tying into Christmas pretend play experience is just just recently, Yeah, my daughter has been big into making pretend food for her for her babies and dinosaurs and everything to eat. And the making of the pretend food is so chaotic, it's
truly marvelous. Like, you know, there's a little pretend pot, and into it goes the box of rice with the box and a banana and a hot dog and a you know, and grapes and everything, and you're just imagining all of this together and it's like, do you think that would taste good? Yeah? Yeah, But to jump out
of the pretend mindset for a second. One thing that Weissberg sort of specifies about object substitution play is that in this kind of play, actions that are directed toward the object do not actually affect the object in the intended way. They take place, you know, within what is called a pretend world or a pretend frame. So when the child pretends to cook pretend food in a you know, in a toy pod or something, the food does not actually get heated to the point of boiling or whatever.
There's just generally a pretend logic of the effects of actions upon the object that is substituted. Now coming back to a question we raised earlier. Sometimes it is not clear if a play behavior is pretend play or just literal play. Like we brought up the idea of a child building with blocks, so they're building a big stack of blocks. Are they just building a big stack of blocks, or are they pretending to build a structure that people
live inside. Sometimes the distinction could be blurry and fluid, easily switching back and forth between the literal frame and the pretend frame. For you know, in one minute, it might be just a stack of blocks. The next minute, oh, it is a building full of people. Then they might forget it's a building full of people and it's just
blocks again. And this problem of temporal switching between literal play and pretend play can of course create difficulties for researchers who want to study this same distinction with play fighting, right, like, are we literally just wrestling? Or am I Dwayne the Rock Johnson and your Jason Stathum or whatever. Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting to think about how the switches back and forth not only with kids, but as adults. Like, you know, you can think of something like writing. You know, at times writing can take on a feeling of play, you know where you're losing yourself in an imaginative exercise. But then oh, you've got to stop and do a little grammar or a little bit of it work. I guess nowadays, are you in the old days, it would have been oh, now I have to fix the typewriter.
You know, there are various tasks we engage in well shift gears on us. Now.
One question is when does this happen in childhood? The answer is it varies, but pretend play behavior most often starts to appear around eighteen months old or so, though there's variation in the timeline, so you know, sometimes it's earlier, sometimes it's later. Usually the earliest form of pretend play observed is what we were just talking about. Its object substitution,
pretending an object is something else. Now, interesting question is why does that come first, to come before these other types of pretend play that I'm about to get into. Maybe we can come back to that later. A variation on object substitution is what you already mentioned, with the sort of the receding physical prop concept of the lightsaber arising usually in early preschool years maybe meaning around two to three years old. Is object substitution involving invisible or
non existent objects. So usually you get with a prop object substitution first. That might start around eighteen months or so, and then you know, in the next couple of years, you can get fully pretend phone. So it's not like I'm holding a remote and pretending it's a phone. There's nothing in my hand, but I have a phone and I'm calling grandmother. Also in the early preschool years, Weisberg says that kids start to make a distinction between two
different things. They distinguish between what's called enactment play versus replica play, and so the difference goes like this, enactment play is like I dress up like Dad and pretend to cook dinner like him, possibly involving props. You know, you might have a play kitchen and toy utensils and food or not involving these props, just doing it with the invisible but I am the one pretending with my body to be the something else. Versus replica play is I have my doll cook dinner in a tiny kitchen
in the dollhouse. Both are forms of pretend play, but in enactment play, the child is themself playing the part, and in replica play the child makes a physical avatar like a doll play the part now springboarding off of that, the paper gets into something that we may put off because I don't know if you want to say something about this now, Robb, or if you just want to save it for part two. But it does get into imaginary companions as well.
Yeah, largely we'll save that for the next episode. But I will like briefly mention that you know you can still you can still get into distinctions of what is an imaginary friend, what is an imaginary companion, and how sometimes personified objects are seen as examples of imaginary companions. So you know, it's one of these things where it's easy to think, oh, imaginary friend, that's a that's a definitely one thing. It's definitely an invisible counterpart that a
child has this imagined relationship with. But when you get into the particularly I was looking at one meta analysis that I'll reference in the next episode. It it gets a little more complex than that, and there are different ways of again teasing it apart.
Yeah, sometimes there's a prop there too, Like a classic example is Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes. This is a understood to be in physical reality a stuffed animal, but it is imagined by the child to be an entity with a consistent personality that the child interacts with over time, in which case it really is sort of a form of imaginary companion, even though there is a physically existing prop.
Yeah, and sometimes that prop I was reading, you know, it can actually seem to enhance the imaginative aspect. So you know, it might be tempting to think about it in the reverse and think, well, this is here to sort of stand in for imagination, but no, it can
often enhance it. And you know, man, you can go wild with just that concept alone thinking about you know, examples of you know, various physical representations of deities and fantastic beings and creatures, and you know, in many cases beings and entities thought to have some level of reality to you know, adult human practitioners of various religions and so forth throughout time, and even down to various knick knacks and toys that grown folks may have on their
deaths at home or in the office. You know, an avatar of Godzilla, you know that maybe enhances the reality of Godzilla.
There's a concept Weisberg mentions in this paper that we may want to come back to when we do the full thing on imaginary companions. But it is the idea of paracosms, meaning quote, imaginary worlds occupied by many pretend entities and subject to their own internal rules. So I think that's sort of like extending the concept of an imaginary companion to more like a whole world of potential
imaginary companions. That you know, it's like a different world that has its own rules and its own inhabitants, and I have imaginary access to it.
Wow, the unseen world. Yeah, I mean, it is almost times startling to think about how closely all of this mirrors the more sort of we often think, you know, complex systems of the real and the imagined, the real and the mythic and so forth that adults have. Like to a certain extent, it's already there, or at least it's already well coming together at a very early age.
Yeah. Yeah, And actually that brings us to the next thing from this paper I wanted to talk about, which is the distinction between pretend and reality. So, for most children, the peak density of pretend play is observed between the ages of three and five, though, as we've seen it starts earlier than that, and it really extends all throughout life in more limited ways. But between three and five
is when most kids are doing the most pretending. There's a lot going on, and so when that's happening, adults around these children often find themselves wondering can kids tell the difference between fantasy and reality? It's a kind of natural thing for parents to start. I don't know, I don't know if most parents actually worry about it, but to at least kind of wonder, like, do they understand
this isn't real? And though I think there are very natural reasons that adults wonder or even worry about this, Weisberg says that the research shows yes, generally, even quite young children have no trouble distinguishing between pretend facts and real facts, and by a round age four, most children can explain that what happens in the pretend play is
not quote real. It seems that children do make more pretense reality confusion errors than adults, but they're still usually aware of the difference.
Yeah, I mean can It's understandable that as parents we can be overprotective, overly protective, and we may we'll at least sometimes question it, and we'll think, well, did they really know what's real and what's not? What's to deal with this imaginary friend? Who is this imaginary friend? And then added on top of that, as I'll get into more next episode, is the Certainly, for a while, their imaginary friends were not seen as being a positive aspect
of childhood development. They were seen as as as as a red flag. And uh, and I think there's still a legacy of that sort of in the popular mindset, you know, even though we've moved on from that view of things.
Yeah, the stuff I was reading did not suggest imaginary companions were anything to worry about, and that they're extremely common somewhere. But depending on how you define it, somewhere between like a third to two thirds of kids under seven have them.
Though it still can be weird when you hear about it. You know, you're like, oh, you have an imaginary friend, and you're speaking about them as if they're real, and you know, and part of that is we've you know a lot of us have seen too many horror movies, so that's where mind goes, you know. But no, it's there's there's absolutely nothing wrong with it according to the current research.
Yeah, and also studies of pretend to play have found that in general, children are quite good at what the author of this paper calls core unteening, which means that like causal or mechanical understandings from a pretend to game do not affect understandings in reality. So an example given in the paper is like a child will use a banana as a pretend telephone, and they can be really into this banana phone game, but it does not lead the child to believe that bananas can actually place calls
or that real phones can be eaten. So they're able to quarantine the implications of the pretend game and not let that affect their understanding of how the world works.
So that's one less thing you parents have to freak out about, is that pretend phone play will lead to the eating of phones and the the frenzied attempt to make calls on bananas.
Now I was wondering, though. I mean, of course, there might be individual cases where there is something you know that's worth following up about, but in most cases it's not much to worry about. When kids are playing pretend, they actually can basically tell the difference. So why do adults worry about this. I think one reason might just be like the commitment with which children engage and pretend
to play. It's a level of unself conscious gameness for enjoyment in a scenario that is difficult for adults to understand, even if they're adults who are still pretty well practiced and pretend play. Maybe you're an adult who does theater and does D and D and stuff, so you pretend a lot more than most adults do. Still, you probably cannot really get in the level of gameness for pretend that a child has.
Well, they just do it so earnestly and unashamedly, and at the same time as adults. I feel like we often compartmentalize our imagine worlds and our dreaming. Either it is tied up with particular you know, acts and activities social or otherwise you know, creative endeavors, or we just kind of, like, I don't know, we can be very
hypocritical when we think about it. You know, like we may be spending you know, a large portion of our days reverting into some sort of a fantasy world, be it something we've dreamt up or something that has been dreamt up by authors and artists and so forth. But yeah, it's a different scenario than to see it in the child.
And then on top of that, I think there is this or at least I'm speaking mostly for my own part here, but you know, as a parent, you look to your child, and especially during those early days, you really want to hold on to and appreciate these like this pure imagination and all of these, you know, various
aspects of childhood. But at the same time, like you do want them to develop and grow, and you realize they will grow out of this and they will become ever become small adults, eventually entering into an adult world. So we're kind of like torn, you know, like we want them to change, but we the last thing we want is for them to change, yea. And it results probably in all sorts of again counterintuitive ideas and expectations.
And yeah, and we can also be hypocritical in the way we judge things like the pursuit of fantasy.
Yeah, I mean that tension is like one of the most classically I guess understood bittersweet things about being a parent. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, you want them to grow up, but you don't.
And then at the same time, yeah, you can't help but be a bit anxious and worrying and like, well, will they ever know the difference between a banana and a phone? Is this permanent or is this just a kid thing now.
On the other hand, to be fair, it is still found that children make more pretense reality distinction errors than adults do, and parents and other adult caregivers do see some instances where children really can't seem to tell the difference between imagination and reality, or where like something from the imagination infects their reality. An example given in the paper is like when an originally fun pretend monster game
becomes scary to the child. So, you know, like you're running around playing monster Chase where mom is a monster and she's roaring and chasing the child around, and this is not a scary game to the child. The child thinks this is like very funny and very fun running around, laughing, squealing. But then maybe one time after this game, seemingly out of nowhere, the child becomes upset and says she's scared. She says, now she thinks there's a monster in her closet and she's scared to go to bed.
I mean, I still do this to myself occasionally. I'm like, oh, that horror movie was fun till it wasn't.
Yes, right, and it's not just fear. Also, you know, you can have like, oh, my toy kitty cat fell off the couch and she got hurt and now I'm actually sad. I'm like crying. So you know what's going on here? Well here, Weisberg doesn't fully know the answer, but refers to a couple of other short papers addressing this issue of like, what's happening when it seems like
kids when the imagination infects the understanding of reality. And one of the papers was by an author named Ted Ruffman, published in the journal Developmental Science in two thousand and two,
called Pretense Reality Confusions in Children and Adults. I went and looked this up, and I'll try to quickly summarize what Ruffman thinks, but it's addressing issues like when the pretend monster has suddenly become scary, and Ruffman says much along the lines you were saying, Rob, it's helpful to look at adult analogies to better understand what's going on. And one of the principles he brings up is availability
or salience. You know, adults also get scared after watching a horror movie for fun, despite fully understanding that the movie is not real and cannot hurt them. So you just finished watching New Nos Faratu or something, and you don't want to go downstairs by yourself. Is it because you can't tell the difference between fiction and reality. Probably not.
Ruffman argues that in instead, the fear caused by a fictional horror movie is probably due to a combination of number one emotion will come to that in a second, but also availability or salience, and in psychology these terms
mean essentially increased awareness of something. So you know a horror movie even though you don't think the events of it are real, it just sort of puts front of mind for you the idea of deadly threats and threatening other worldly encounters, whether or not you think they're actually likely to happen to you. Now, it's just high in your awareness, and so that puts you on edge for
threats of whatever type. The other thing is emotion. It's possible that what gets carried over from say, watching a movie, is a free floating emotion without a reference in the real world. So again you know that the events of the sad movie or the scary movie are not literally true, but they give you an emotion that lingers, and then that emotion, without a reference in your life, can just
kind of get attached to whatever. This may happen even easier for children, because children may feel emotions even more intensely, and the act of pretending itself tends to result in heightened emotions for children.
I don't want to complicate things too much by bringing up dreams, but I feel like this is maybe more pronounced for grown ups. In that situation where you wake up from a disturbing dream and you still feel disturbed, you know you can't help but carry that over into at least the first portion of your morning, even though you know that was a dream, and maybe even analysis of the facts of the dream are just ridiculous, but
the feeling remains. And I think I have encountered that with films before as well, if they are particularly either I'm particularly sensitive, or the vibe is particularly strong in a given film, or some combination of the two. So yeah, taking those two into account, I think helps me better understand where a child may be coming from when they have this situation.
Yeah, But then there's a third thing Ruffman brings up that I think is the So we have those similarities with kids on those first two things, the emotion and the UH and the availability or salience, But then there's
a big difference, which is our background knowledge. Roufman points out that, simply put, kids know less than adults about how the world works and what is in it, So it is actually less unreasonable than it seems too adults for children to entertain implausible scenarios like there's a monster in my closet. By the time you're forty, you should be aware that this is actually not something that happens
in reality. They're not monsters in closets. But when you're three, it's reasonable to consider this is a still live option, like you don't have enough experience to reasonably rule that out.
By the time you're forty, though, like late thirties, still understandable.
So this still does not necessarily mean that children have confused what happens in a pretend game with what happens in reality. So you know, a child might worry that there's an unseen monster in the closet, but would probably not worry that like you know, mommy playing the monster chase game. That means mom literally turned into a monster when she was chasing the kid around and roaring. You know, there can just be kind of a vague infection of ideas from one to the other, even if you don't
confuse the pretend scenario for a literal reality. Yeah.
Yeah, it's also worth caveating here though, that you know, even as adults, we can still even though we know think we know how the world works, it doesn't mean we really know how the world works at all levels. And we're also prone to latching onto best case scenarios and worst case scenarios as if those are the most most likely outcomes. So yeah, there's there's a lot of room for error in all of this. But yeah, I
understand the basic idea here. Yeah, the kids just know less about the world, and they're able to they're more susceptible to the contagion of those ideas.
All right, From here, I want to skip over a few things in the paper and move on to talking about a couple of the mental capacities that the author of this paper mentioned as possibly being related to pretend play in childhood, and the three that the author explores
are symbolic understanding, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning. As I said, we might save theory of mind more for part two, But applying to all three of these concepts, pretend play appears to have links to the development of these abilities, but there are a lot of questions about how strong these links are and how they work, Like should it be understood that pretend to play is causally
necessary for learning any of them? Or is it merely fact facilitative, meaning making it easier or faster to learn them? Or could they be working in the opposite direction, like the nascent beginnings of these capacities are what makes pretend play possible, or could pretend play be what is called epiphenomenal, meaning an unnecessary byproduct of these developing capacities, Like it doesn't do anything itself, it just emerges because the brain
can do these things. Weisberg notes that this really is difficult to study scientifically. It's hard to get really conclusive answers on a lot of these questions, especially because it is hard to build robust and ethical experiments on this, Like you can't really have control groups in which you force children to grow up without engaging and pretend play. That's not really ethical. So a lot of the ways
we would have of studying. These questions are like indirect ways of looking at it and leave us with maybe helpful but still incomplete evidence. So the first thing to look at here is symbolic understanding. Pretend play is really interesting because it is symbolic in nature. And to come back to one example that shows this pretty easily. The usually the first acquired form of pretend to play in child development object substitution. So the stick is a sword,
the remote control is a phone. This wash cloth is a warm blanket for the baby dinosaur. Things stand in for other things that they in a literal sense, are not, though they might be closer or further in you know, physical form to the thing they're supposed to represent. You know, pretending a baby doll is a baby is still a form of pretending, because even though a baby doll is made to be is to look like a baby, it
resembles a baby, it is not literally a baby. So like it, you know, when you feed it, it doesn't actually eat, and so forth.
But pretending a remote control is a phone, like that's that's rather straightforward, and actually, I mean when you're super young, like, what's the difference between all of these various gadgets that your parents have in their house, right, I mean, it's all just slightly different versions of the same thing.
Sure, yeah, yeah, Despite the general lack of understanding about, you know, the intricacies of how a lot of devices work in real life. In pretend to play, I mean, a child can really learn to consistently, across time manipulate a symbolic object as if it were the thing it represented, having the properties, functions, and effects of the pretend object.
So like, you know, the child might not really understand fully how a phone works, but they can keep treating the remote as a phone in place calls with it. They might even try to FaceTime, you know, the like they'll they will go through activities that they've seen adults do with the phone. So what Weisberg notes that some child development scholars dispute the extent to which pretend to
play should be seen as actually symbolic. Now, there are a couple of different frameworks here, different ways of thinking about what pretending is in something like object substitution. Is it simply a behavior or is it actually a mentalistic process of representation in the brain. Is it a mental state? Now?
Weisberg explains the behavior view like this quote. When pretending that a banana is a phone, one behaves as if the banana was a phone and performs the actions with the banana that would be appropriate if the banana was a phone. No mentalizing is necessary for the game to proceed, as the pretense is connected primarily to behaviors and not
necessarily to mental states or intentions. So in this view, the child does not actually need to have separate concepts of banana and phone and mentally apply the attributes of the phone to the banana, understanding that they are in fact different. Instead, they're just treating the banana as if it were actually a phone. What is the support for this view, Well, Weisberg cites research where if you take
four year olds and five year olds. Take these children and you show them a character hopping like a kangaroo, and then you tell the kids that the character who hops like a kangaroo does not know what a kangaroo is, and then you ask them is the hopping character pretending to be a kangaroo? The majority of four and five year olds will say yes. In their view, the hopping character is pretending to be a kangaroo, even if the character has never heard of a kangaroo and doesn't know
what it is. Now. Actually, I think that's a really interesting finding that might seem kind of subtle, and I don't know whether it proves the pure behavior view of pretend play, but I think this is just kind of an interesting result. Nonetheless, I don't think adults would make the same judgment. I think if you asked adults, we would probably mostly say that you need to know what something is in order to pretend to be that thing.
But for a lot of four and five year olds, know you only need to act like a thing to pretend to be it.
Yeah, for adults, I feel like the revelation that the individual acting like a kangaroo doesn't know what a kangaroo is, like, that's potentially horrifying. Yeah, right, that makes things a lot more concerning. Yeah, but they're just like, well, yeah, they're pretending to be a kangaroo. Of course, they're pretending to be a kangaro. It doesn't matter if they don't know what one is. They are pretending to be a kangaroo.
But Weisberg argues that subsequent research on this question has made the initial result maybe a little more complicated, and it's possible that this doesn't really tell us what's happening when children pretend, but is instead addressing a second order related question of how children conceptualize what pretending is, which is an interesting question but a different one because like a child may not actually be able to fully explain
their own mental states in pretending. They might be doing one thing when pretending, but when you ask a child what pretending is, they'll tell you something kind of different.
Yeah, it's such an adult impulse too, to like, okay that then you were doing. Now I'm going to ruin it by asking you to explain it, you know, like they're just doing it. They're just engaging in the pretend play.
Now. The other view, the mental symbolism view. This is the view that says children are indeed engaging in mental symbolism when they play pretend, and in this case, the game quote crucially requires understanding something about the mental states involved so that one is aware what is intended in the game. So under this view, it would be important to understand that you are intending to pretend to be a kangaroo in order to pretend to be a kangaroo.
So in this view, like if a kid is playing the banana phone game, it is necessary that they understand and that all play partners understand that the banana is supposed to represent a phone now. As evidence supporting this view, Weisberg sites some other interesting experimental findings. One is experiments showing that kids in this preschool age can readily navigate a bunch of different pretend to play episodes with different partners, which depends on keeping track of what each different play
partner knows about what the play props represent. So maybe Dad knows, but Mom does not know that this pile of crayons is actually spaghetti and my dinosaurs are eating it. Mom would need to be informed that the crayons are spaghetti. Now, how can you tell that children have this ability to navigate the different understandings like this? Children often get upset or protest when a play partner starts using a prop
literally instead of in its symbolic identity. So like, if we're playing the crayons or spaghetti game and then I go pick up a spaghetti crayon and start drawing with it, the child is very likely to be like, no, that is spaghetti, not a crayon. If you encountered this.
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely in these more abstract forms, but also in the case of stuffed animals or stuffies, like what is the difference between a stuffed animal and a pillow? Try and use a beloved stuffed animal as a pillow, and the child will let you know.
Oh yeah, classic, that's a great one. But so generally, the children in this kind of example only protest like this if the play partner should be expected to know about the substitution, So like if the person they're playing with was present when the pretense began, So that's kind of interesting. You know, the child will have more patience for somebody who just entered the picture and doesn't understand that the crayons are spaghetti. More evidence that pretend to
play is mentally symbolic and not just behavioral. Some actions observed and pretend to play only make sense if there is a symbolic representation, and do not make sense if the child were simply behaving as if the object really was the substitution object. Here's an example. You've got a little Lego block and you decide it's a car, and you are pushing the Lego block around and saying vroom vroom and making horn honking sounds. Children do stuff like
this all the time. Is that what a child does in relation to a real car push it around and say vroom vroom.
No.
In a real car, the child like gets inside and rides and maybe looks out the window. There is no behavior to enact in relation to a real car that is similar to pushing a tiny object around on the ground and making vrooming sounds and horn honking sounds with your mouth. This really only makes sense if the child understands that the block is not a car but represents a car. So in the end, Weisberg argues that the
symbolic view of pretense is better supported by the evidence. Now, what does this mean for the broader idea of symbolic understanding and child development. Again, it's hard to prove this kind of thing conclusively, but a lot of researchers have suggested that there's a link between pretend play and symbolic thinking, and it means that pretend play could be important for the development of the most significant form of symbolic thinking
in human culture, which is language. Language is inherently symbolic because a word is not the thing itself, It only represents the thing, so it may be that pretend play gives children a chance to practice symbolic thinking, which in turn helps accelerate their acquisition of language in early childhood. Some researchers apparently think this, but again it's hard to disentangle the variables and see which direction if any of
the causal relationship goes. One thing is pretty clear is that pretending is not necessary for language acquisition, but it may simply make it easier and faster. Weisberg briefly offers another interesting idea. This is almost just an aside and a sentence, but it really started working around in my brain. Wesberg writes, quote play may provide an especially facilitative environment
for children to experiment with new syntactic constructions. If I understand that right, I think this means that because pretending during play allows you to generate infinitely variable scenarios without ever having to leave your home or your normal routines,
it encourages novel constructions of language based thought. So, in other words, a child may literally do almost the same thing in the same place most days, but because playing pretend can create weird, novel situations with very little effort or risk, you will be required to think and speak new sentences, which is important as you get better at speaking and practice your language skills, you know, under what other I was just thinking about, like what my daughter's
doing in the past few days. She's like, she is making new weird sentences all the time, Like you know, little gholies, get on boat and go on water and see red buoye and go to Nana's house.
Little goolies, where did she pick up? Has she seen the movie?
No, she's got she's got some little some little weird, little weird guys who are ugulies.
Yeah, okay, that makes sense, but yeah, I mean this is again this touches on one of the great things about being around children is that they are just such a font of wild creativity that grown ups typically just don't have as ready access to. Like I'm sure this is a story I've told on the show before, but this was before I became a parent. I went to
an improv show. It was like a local improv group, and they were doing a kid's puppet show, but it was entirely improv and they would ask the children to give them ideas to then act out. And so even like seasoned improv group, like they were really you know, they were really rolling with some of these ideas, Like I distinctly remember one little girl saying Batman the girl
as being one of the concepts. Anyway, that's just one example. Obviously, anyone who's been around children for any length of time can think of a hundred more.
Yeah, they get they get weird. Yeah, did I already mention? Mine is also right now obsessed with changing diapers on dinosaurs. On dinosaurs, the dinosaurs have diapers, and they often have poop needs to be changed.
Well, you know, that's that's just sensible.
Oh but quickly before we move off of the symbolic understanding thing, h Weisberg, the language is clearly the most important type of symbolic skills in human culture. Language is not the only symbolic skill practiced through pretend to play. Another one the author mentions is quote reasoning with maps
and scale models. That's the type of symbolic representation. You can think of a play space on the floor as really being much like a map, a scale representation of a topography or landscape in miniature on which you can sort of plot routes and act things out. And this is a big part of adult reasoning about how to get around places.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes sense since you consider that often a child's room contains multiple scale models, be they lego kits that have been assembled or you know, or stuffies that are of vehicles. I mean there are a million different variations of this obviously, but by having those objects in a space, it kind of turns that space into a kind of map or a miniaturized world.
Totally. Okay, one more thing before we wrap up Part one. Here is Weisberg's exploration of the link between pretend play and counter factual reasoning. So, counterfact ctual reasoning is reasoning based on a premise that you do not accept as current reality. So here's one. If cheetos were blue instead of orange, what color would your fingertips become after eating them? You know that cheetos are not actually blue, but you
can easily answer this question because you can reason counterfactually. Right, blue? Right? Got it on the record, Yes, okay, So you know, as a comparison, imagine this banana war a phone. How would you use it? It's easy to see playing pretend as really almost exactly the same thing as counterfactual reasoning. You start with a premise that is not literal. It is different than how you think the world actually is, and then you act it out. You follow from there.
But interestingly, studies have found that children in the so called high season of pretend to play, you know, this period of like three to five years old, where they're playing pretend all the time. Kids in this age range show a lot of difficulty with counterfactual reasoning and experiments. Some examples cited by Weisberg here. One is like an experiment where a kid watches a toy mouse go down a little forked slide and then answers questions about it.
So you can imagine, one condition is the child watches the mouse go down the fork in one direction, and then the experimenter asks, if the mouse goes down the opposite side of the fork next time, where will it end up. Kids do okay with this question. It's a hypothetical question about a future event, and they've already seen
how the slide works in principle, so they do okay. However, they have a lot more difficulty with almost exactly the same question, but just if it's phrased as a counterfactual instead, So you show them the mouse going down one side of the fork, and then you ask them if the mouse had gone down the other way of the fork instead, where would it have ended up. Apparently kids really struggle
with this. Children at this age also really struggle with counterfactual syllogisms, like the like the blue Cheetos thing reasoning based on a counterfactual premise, so you can say something like, imagine a world where cats bark instead of me owing. In this world, Fluffy is a cat. Does Fluffy bark
or meow? Preschoolers struggle with this as well. They seem to have a hard time ignoring their legitimate knowledge about the real world, which is that cats meow, they do not bark, And so the kids want to say Fluffy meows because they know that cats meow.
I mean, I can see the difficulty because this is kind of like a bedrock understanding of reality, you know, And if you snatch that away and flip it around, yeah, it takes a minute to recalibrate to that.
So it's very interesting that counterfactual reasoning and playing pretend seem to us to be nearly the same thing. They're almost exactly the same thing. Yet preschoolers tend to excel at one and struggle with the other. Genuine skill at counterfactual reasoning only seems to come online later with some effort and training. So one idea offered in this paper
is the idea of implicit versus explicit understanding. So when pretending children engage an implicit or intuitive sense of counterfactual reasoning, that's acted out through play in the body. But maybe what they struggle with is understanding counterfactual reasoning purely in words, which is why they're having trouble with syllogisms. That's one possibility,
it's the explicit versus implicit. But also interesting thing is that some experiments have shown that you can improve preschooler's performance on counterfactual syllogisms simply by explaining the counterfactual element as pretend play. So you can imagine asking, maybe a kid struggles with the you know the like you know, cats bark in this world? What is Fluffy the cat say? Instead, you could say, fluffy the cat is pretending to be a dog. When he is pretending to be a dog,
does he bark or meow? So maybe this kind of thing can can kind of get through more more on the implicit wavelength. But anyway, some Researchers have argued that the adaptive function of pretend to play is exactly this about counterfactual reasoning. It's to prepare children for serious counterfactual reasoning later in life. And I want to emphasize that counterfactual reasoning is not just like high flutint philosophical thought experiments or you know, it's not just on that level.
I mean, we engage in counterfactual reasoning every single day. One function of counterfactual reasoning that is very useful is to learn not only from mistakes made, but from mistakes almost made, or from the mistakes of others. So you can think, you can like go through an experience and then think, wow, if I had done it this other way, that could have gone really bad, and you can learn from that even though you didn't actually have that experience.
You just know enough to know that you shouldn't have done that, and you won't do that in the future.
Yeah, that's a great point.
Like who knows, maybe you know, you take the boat ride across the river even though you were thinking about swimming, and halfway across you see some crocodiles and you remember, like, oh, I can reason if I had swam instead of riding the boat. That would have been bad.
It reminds see there's a line in I Figure which Cormick McCarthy book, but there's a character pondering all the worse luck, their bad luck might have saved them from.
Yeah yeah yeah. Now Again, what's less clear is to what extent there is any kind of direct training effects. It seems plausible that pretend to play really does train the brain for counterfactual reasoning, But we don't know. But interesting thing to study and cert plausible based on what we do know. Now, I think we're starting to run a little long, so this might be the place that we have to cut part one here. But obviously there's going to be a lot more to say about Pretend
to Play in subsequent episodes. At least one more, we can promise you. Yeah.
Now, I do have a few follow up questions, so before we close out, First of all, where do you stand on air guitar? You being a person who actually plays a guitar, do you, as a grown up engage in air guitar? Do you find yourself playing the air guitar whilst listening to music for at least moments of not extended periods.
I don't know what this says about me, but I really know do not play air guitar at all. This no judgment against it. I'm fully supportive of air guitar behaviors, but I don't find myself doing it when I listen to music. I just I dance, but air guitar is not part of the repertoire.
How about air drums?
Oh, I do more of that. Interesting. I don't actually play the drums, but I'm more likely to act out playing drums without real drums there.
Yeah huh. Interesting, Like if in the air tonight place, you're definitely going to go do the.
Yeah, yeah, all the fills, the fills in a gottadavida, the drum solo. I cannot listen to that drum solo without acting it out.
I will catch myself doing air guitar, but then I get very self conscious because I'm like, I don't know how to play the guitar. What am I doing? I'm just very roughly mimicking things that I've seen before. And then I put my hands in my pockets.
Don't let it hold you back now.
And then my other follow up question a pair of questions, really or observations involve again the banana as a telephone. First of all, are kids still doing this? Because we should point out that telephones don't really look like bananas anymore, like telephone receivers used to have more of a banana shape to them. More and more, I feel like kids are not exposed to those sorts of telephones. They're seeing smartphones that look more like TV remote controls.
That's interesting. Well, well, you know in this in the paper, it was the banana as phone that was often cited. But I was using the example of the remotest phone because that is what happens in our house.
Here's the other thing that comes to mind. The bananas phone definitely kills though, Like I feel like this is something that's definitely going to elicit laughter from grown ups. If a grown up does it, and if a kid does it, this is also going to get a lot of laughs out of mom and dad. I wonder to what extent that is factored into anything.
Pretend play is funnier when the reach is farther and when the literal object is food.
Yes, because the food the food technology gap is greater, right, yeah, and it you know, to get you were getting into the question of like, okay, how would this work if it were a phone? Like? That question is more ridiculous with the banana. How would the banana possibly function as a like fully grown telecommunication device? You know we can?
So how do I put this on speaker?
Yeah? All right, that's all I got. Those are the only follow up question.
Okay, all right, well, folks, we're gonna have to cut part one there, but we will be back with more about pretend to play on Thursday.
That's right, Bring your imaginary friend and we'll have a good old time, all right. In the meantime, we're just gonna remind you stuff to blow your mind. Primarily a science and culture podcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, those are the core episode of publication.
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