Doll play provides opportunities for children to practice social skills by creating imaginary worlds, taking others' perspectives, and talking about others' internal states. Previous research using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) found a region over the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) was more active during solo doll play…

The paper brings Froebel's philosophy into conversation with that of Deleuze. We focus on "the fold" and "on self-activity" as key concepts that hold a special place in the monist philosophies of both thinkers. One point at which their (very different) ontologies coincide is their conceptualization of a cosmos in which…

Symbolic play is a powerful vehicle for supporting emotional development and communication. It embraces all developmental capacities. This article describes how symbols are formed and how emotional themes are symbolized whereby children reveal their understanding of the world, their feelings and relationships, and how they see themselves in the…

Executive functions enable children to pay attention, follow instructions, apply what they have learned, have those "aha!" moments in which they grasp how multiple facts interrelate, think of creative solutions, obey social norms such as waiting their turn and not butting in line or jumping out of their seat, mentally construct a plan,…

For play researchers, no one looms larger than Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky viewed play, particularly pretend play, as a critical part of childhood, allowing a child to stand "a head taller than himself." His biggest theoretical contribution may have been the Zone of Proximal Development: the idea that children are capable of a range of achievement…

The role of the imagination in adult thinking is to go beyond reality and to express generalised laws. The researcher's job is to specify the cultural tools that preschool children use in the development of their imagination. Previous research has identified two main stages in the development of imagination up until the age of six, a third stage…

Two experiments examined whether preschoolers' difficulties on tasks that required relating pretending and knowledge (e.g., Lillard, A. S. (1993a). "Young children's conceptualization of pretense: Action or mental representational state?" "Child Development, 64," 372-386) were due to children's inability to appreciate the causal mechanism behind…

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…

Based on the testimony of others, children learn about a variety of figures that they never meet. We ask when and how they are able to differentiate between the historical figures that they learn about (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) and fantasy characters (e.g., Harry Potter). Experiment 1 showed that both younger (3- and 4-year-olds) and older children…

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…

The author offers the thesis that hunter-gatherers promoted, through cultural means, the playful side of their human nature and this made possible their egalitarian, nonautocratic, intensely cooperative ways of living. Hunter-gatherer bands, with their fluid membership, are likened to social-play groups, which people could freely join or leave.…

Background: Previous research has reported a link between imaginary companions (ICs) in middle childhood and the perception of verbal material in ambiguous auditory stimuli. These findings have been interpreted in terms of commonalities in the cognitive processes underlying children's engagement with ICs and adults' reporting of imaginary verbal…

Describes the stories told by two three-year-olds and suggests that the storytelling process is a healthy expression of children's imaginations. (DD)

In this essay I argue that when children come to school they are confronted by an intervention in their learning, and comprehension of the world in general, that contrasts with the experiences of learning that they have generated previously to make sense of their world. Prior to schooling, where learning is directed from outside, children have…

Proposes the iii system as a theory to clarify how creative drama works. Explains how participants in an arts experience go through an internal process (iii system) of image, imagery, and imagination. Notes that those who experience the richest, most varied drama activity seem to complete this process. (PD)