Children's toys provide a rich arena for investigating conceptual flexibility, because they often can be understood as possessing an individual identity at multiple levels of abstraction. For example, many dolls (e.g., Winnie-the-Pooh) and action figures (e.g., Batman) can be construed either as characters from a fictional world or as physical…

From the age of 2.5, children use social information to rapidly form enduring function-based artifact categories. The present study asked whether even younger children likewise constrain their use of objects according to teleo-functional beliefs that artifacts are "for" particular purposes, or whether they use objects as means to any desired end.…

The ability to engage in and recognize pretend play begins around 18 months. A major challenge for theories of pretense is explaining how children are able to engage in pretense, and how they are able to recognize pretense in others. According to one major account, the metarepresentational theory, young children possess both production and…