Make believe

Make believe, also known as pretend play or imaginative play, is a loosely structured form of play that generally includes role-play, object substitution and nonliteral behavior. What separates play from other daily activities is its fun and creative aspect rather than being an action performed for the sake of survival or necessity. Children engage in make believe for a number of reasons. It provides the child with a safe setting to express fears and desires. When children participate in pretend play, they are integrating and strengthening previously acquired knowledge.

History

The interest in pretend play advanced through three significant stages, though it has likely existed since the dawn of humanity, as children tend to do this naturally on their own, without coercion, or needing a term to describe what they are doing. The initial stage was during the 1920s and 1930s when research in play had gained popularity. During this time, there were little or no empirical findings specifically about pretend play. A revival of interest starting in the late 1940s signified the second stage. The new mission was to find how pretend play related to the developing personality of a child. A common hypothesis during this period was that pretend behavior projected a child's inner feelings and reflected their experiences in their everyday lives. The most recent stage, which persists until today, began in the 1970s. Research in this stage is greatly influenced by Jean Piaget's studies and theories, either in terms of finding evidence to support it or to falsify it. In pretend play, any object in the child's surroundings can be used as a prop.

Substitution

Any object can be integrated into pretend play as a representation of another object. This kind of representation is referred to as substitution. The ability to substitute one object for another emerges when a child is about 2 years old. However, some cultures tend to disapprove it and believe that it is a form of communication with spirits or devils. and what attributes the child needs to ignore, form and/or function. Overall, prior research has shown that pretend play activities can improve a child's executive function, but whether the act of pretending or some other part of the activity such as practice inventing a story or building a fortress is responsible is still an open question.

Learning and knowledge acquisition

Pretend play is not only associated with developing general cognitive abilities While children do not invent new knowledge on their own, when pretending with others, children make judgements about the generalizability of unknown information introduced by others in the pretend context. These judgements affect the degree to which children believe the information is applicable and reflective of the real world. There are a number of factors known to influence these judgements including the fantastical themes employed in the pretend world as well as the credibility of the other play participants.

Emotions

By the age of three, children are generally able to distinguish fantasy and pretense from reality, but there are a number of reasons why children might confuse the two. In some cases, it appears as though children are unable to regulate their emotions, especially fear, and this leads to what may seem like confusion between reality and pretense, such as monsters hiding in their toy bin. Negative emotions such as fear and anger also seem to have a negative effect on children's tendency to believe an event is either possibly real or fantasy and either more or less likely to actually happen in reality.

Prior knowledge

From ages as early as 15 months, children demonstrate both an understanding of pretense and expectations of reality being reflected in pretense. At times, pretend play may involve animals, objects, or places that the child knows little or nothing about, and any information about these subjects that is introduced during the pretend play is readily associated with the subject.

Credibility and trust

Children do not treat all new information equally, and in fact a number of situational and source specific factors influence how likely children are to believe information is true or applicable to reality as is the case in pretend play. Jaswal (2010) found that when playing with an adult, children display a general tendency to trust the truthfulness of information, though the extent to which it conflicts with what they already know or believe will still influence the extent they will generalize the information to reality. Also other attributes the adult or peer may influence the child's judgements. Children have been shown to be sensitive to socio-economic cues and differences. Children also look at the informant's stance relative to a perceived group, whether that be the group involved in play or a larger social group that the child identifies with, and will show a bias towards information coming from a less conflicting stance with the majority. Overall children, while biased to trust adults, still apply rational judgements to new information introduced during pretend play that influences their tendency to believe how much that information generalizes to reality.