Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were asked to make judgments about the reality status of four different types of machines: real machines that children and adults interact with on a daily basis, real machines that children and adults interact with rarely (if at all), and impossible machines that violated a real-world physical or biological…

Each fictional world that adults create has its own distinct properties, separating it from other fictional worlds. Here we explore whether this separation also exists for young children's pretend game worlds. Studies 1 and 1A set up two simultaneous games and encouraged children to create appropriate pretend identities for coloured blocks. When…

The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n= 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were demonstrated with these. When children were then allowed to act upon the objects themselves,…