From the Vault: Pretend Play, Part 1

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the world of pretend play in childhood development and human consciousness. (originally published 1/7/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey you Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we have
a vault episode for you. This one originally published one seven,
twenty twenty five. It is Pretend Play, Part one, the
first in a multi part series about the importance of
pretend play for human beings.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
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 by day. Lately,

(01:01):
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 elth?

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Do I know the Christmas Self? Well, there are many elves.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
This is different than the one on the shelf. This
is the 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 elth is.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
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

(02:03):
little doggies that she got for Christmas doggy toys, and
one of them is a begle. So 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 woof, woof, and Rachel said, oh,
are you a beagle right now? And she said no.
Tater Tot got very still. I don't know what exactly

(02:27):
are the properties one mimics when being a tater Tot
that I can't fully inhabit that mindset, but I admire
the ambition.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
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

(03:07):
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
they're sharing the pizza or not, or to what extent
they're keeping pieces of pizza to themselves. Sometimes they're eating

(03:30):
things that you can see there's like a physical prop
for the food. Sometimes they're just eating purely imaginary thing
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. She puts various things on the boat, and
they get on and off the boat and see things

(03:51):
out on the water, and typically they're on a boat
trip to grandparents' house.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
Wow. Yeah, it's a magical time. My own child is
twelve going on thirteen now, so a lot of these,
you know, really awesome examples of imagination player 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 discussed in our

(04:19):
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

(04:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
That's intense pretend. Yeah, yeah, facing the realities of nature
head on.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Well, you know, you tell the story of the dinosaurs,
you got to tell the beginning on the end.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, look, ma, these are evolving into birds.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
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. I think we've

(05:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
So it's actively erupting at the moment.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
And it was kind of implied or I always thought like,
that's the end back there, it's what's happening. It's end
of days for the dinosaurs.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
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 fantage
of you.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
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 it's going to be nice to really dive
into all of this.

Speaker 3 (06:14):
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 clearly this is a
rich subject. There's a lot of scientific research in this area,
but also just a lot of you know, interesting philosophical
thought going back centuries. So there's going to be a
lot to get into. But I thought a good place

(06:36):
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,

(06:57):
and so Rob, if you're ready, I thought we should
just go ahead and I've write 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.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
All right, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
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.

(07:28):
You can think of a game of tag or a
game of kickball. This is clearly play, but it's not
really pretend play because what you 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.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
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
and areo you know, and I think kids are probably
doing some more things today, like imagining it's squid games,
and so I guess it depends on the age, but

(08:10):
you know, dreaming it up a little bit, adding that
layer of imagination on top of it.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
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

(08:36):
the context of tag. So like, I just saw the
movie Anaconda starring Ice Cube and jenn 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.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
But we need to come back to Anaconda on a
weirdest cinema.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
By the way, it's it's so good one of the
most unhinged performances of all time John Voyd in that movie.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
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 depending 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,
I 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

(09:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
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 idea out of
the out of the blocks, you know, be it's some
sort of a character or a creature or you know,
in my case it was often some sort of a

(10:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
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 play. At some level, she knows the remote

(10:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yes. Yes, my child also did a lot of phone
pretend play as well, picking up various items, remote controls,
what have you, pretending their phones.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
So that's a pretty clear case. Coming back to more
ambiguous cases. 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.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
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 going to pretend
to fight with lightsabers. You can have a full official
lightsaber toy with an extendable plastic cone that serves as

(11:44):
the blade of the lightsaber or laser sort if you will.
But then 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

(12:06):
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 like 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

(12:26):
in battles. And so they are like different levels of
having any kind of like actual physical property there to
play off of.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
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

(12:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
And then is it me with the lightsaber to your point?
Or am i obi wan? Am i anakin?

Speaker 3 (13:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (13:23):
And so forth. So, yeah, there's so many different levels
of the imagination to employ here.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
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

(13:58):
complex adult capacity is 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

(14:19):
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

(14:40):
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 edgec count

(15:00):
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

(15:22):
that that's what play is.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
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. But will
some researchers say this classifies as such and such and
others disagree. Yeah, it just depends how you tease it apart.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
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. It has no immediate goal or

(16:02):
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.

(16:25):
So even if I don't know you bring a spirit
of playfulness to your log splitting and you really enjoy
the activity. Most people don't look at that and say
that is play.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
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 while this is going to result
in something that can be utilized in another activity, generally

(16:55):
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

(17:16):
a very capitalist society, I think a lot of us
end up buying into this corrupting notion that if we're
good at something, 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

(17:38):
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

(18:01):
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

(18:23):
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

(18:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
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 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,

(19:18):
or it may mean that what is something that you
used to love just gets turned into a chore.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
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 they
used to love has now become the thing they have
to do every day.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
But this is not a problem that the children have.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
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,

(20:16):
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,

(20:40):
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 under good by the people

(21:00):
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 pretense. This is

(21:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
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 there 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

(21:59):
hot discussion on parenting forums. So get ready for that one, Joe.

Speaker 3 (22:05):
Yeah, 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

(22:25):
like you know, caretaking play, you know, treating the treating
the little plastic dinosaur as a baby.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, exactly. Often a lot of I remember, a lot
of food preparation and foraging play.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, in fact, tying into
Christmas pretend play experiences. 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,

(22:58):
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, 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

(23:22):
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

(23:45):
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 and we raised earlier, sometimes
it is not clear if a play behavior is pretend

(24:05):
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

(24:25):
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

(24:46):
distinction with play fighting, right, Like, are we literally just wrestling,
or am I Dwayne the Rock Johnson and your Jason
Stathum or whatever.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
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 some thing 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.

(25:16):
I guess nowadays there and in the old days it
would have been, oh, now I have to fix the typewriter.
You know, are various tasks we engage in. We'll shift
gears on this now.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
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,

(25:49):
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 in too.
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

(26:11):
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

(26:32):
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

(26:54):
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.

(27:18):
Both are forms of pretend to play, but in enactment play,
the child is themselves 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.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah, largely we'll save that for the next episode, but
I will like briefly mention that you know, you can
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 coons. So

(28:02):
you know, it's one of these things where it's easy
to think, oh, imaginary friend, 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 gets a little more complex

(28:24):
than that, and there are different ways of again teasing
it apart.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:50):
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,

(29:11):
examples of 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

(29:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
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 rule. So I
think that's sort of like extending the concept of an

(30:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
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

(30:36):
it's already well coming together. At a very early age. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
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

(31:05):
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 if
most parents actually worry about it, but to at least

(31:27):
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

(31:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
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 in the next episode, is the Certainly, for a while,

(32:26):
their imaginary friends were not seen as being a positive
aspect of childhood development. They were seen as a red flag.
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.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
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 behind goes, you know. But no, it's
there's absolutely nothing wrong with it according to the current research.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
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 quarantining, 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

(33:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
So that's one last thing your parents have to freak
out about, is that pretend phone play will lead to
the eating of phones and the frenzied attempt to make
calls on bananas.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
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

(34:32):
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
in 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

(34:53):
cannot really get in the level of gameness for pretend
that a child has.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
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

(35:21):
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
dreampt 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

(35:44):
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,
you know, pure imagination and all of these, you know,
various aspects of childhood. But at the same time, like

(36:06):
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. Yeah, and it results

(36:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
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 just, yeah, you want them to grow up, but
you don't.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
And then at the same time, yeah, you can't help
but be a bit anxious and worrying and like, well
they will they ever know the difference between a banana
and a phone? Is this permanent or is this just
a kid thing now.

Speaker 3 (36:57):
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

(37:22):
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

(37:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
I mean, I still do this to myself occasionally, where
I'm like, oh, that horror movie was fun till it wasn't.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
No, yes, right, And it's not just fear. Also, you know,
you can have like, oh, my toy Kitty Kat 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

(38:21):
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

(38:41):
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

(39:04):
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 instead, the fear caused by a fictional

(39:25):
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

(39:47):
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 a 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,

(40:09):
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

(40:32):
act of pretending itself tends to result in heightened emotions
for children.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
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

(41:00):
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

(41:22):
have this situation occur.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
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 and the availability or salience, But then there's a
big difference, which is our background knowledge. Ruffman points out that,
simply put, kids know less than adults about how the
world works and what is in it, So it is

(41:46):
actually less unreasonable than it seems two 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 some thing 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

(42:08):
you don't have enough experience to reasonably rule that out.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
By the time you're forty though, like late thirties, still understandable.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
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 that means mom literally turned into a
monster when she was chasing the kid around and roaring.

(42:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
Yeah, it's also worth caveating here though, that you know,
even as adults, we can still even though we know
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 on to best case scenarios
and worst case scenarios as if those are the most

(43:13):
most likely outcomes. So yeah, 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.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
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
to play in childhood, and the three that the author
explores are symbolic understanding, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning.

(44:00):
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 facilitative,

(44:24):
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

(44:46):
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

(45:08):
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

(45:32):
to one example that shows this pretty easily, the usually
the first acquired form of pretend 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

(45:54):
they might be closer or further in 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.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
But pretending a remote control is a phone, Like, that's
that's rather straightforward. And actually, I mean really 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.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Sure. Yeah, Yet, 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.

(46:57):
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

(47:21):
play should be seen as strictly 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?

(47:43):
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

(48:05):
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

(48:27):
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

(48:50):
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

(49:11):
pretend to play, but I think that's 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.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:53):
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

(50:15):
is an interesting question but a different one because like
a child may not actually be able to fully explain
their own mental states when 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.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
Yeah, it's such an adult impulse too, to like, Okay,
that thing 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.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
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

(51:05):
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, Weissberg
cites some other interesting experimental findings. One is experiments showing

(51:29):
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

(51:50):
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

(52:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
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

(53:08):
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

(53:31):
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 room
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

(53:53):
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

(54:14):
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

(54:37):
lot of researchers have suggested that there is a 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.

(55:00):
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.

(55:20):
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. Weisberg writes, quote
play may provide an especially facilitative environment for children to

(55:44):
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

(56:04):
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

(56:27):
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 buoy
and go to Nana's house.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Little goolies, where did she pick up? Has she seen
the movie?

Speaker 3 (56:47):
No, not the movie. She's got she's got some little
some little weird, little weird guys who are googlies.

Speaker 1 (56:53):
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

(57:15):
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

(57:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (57:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (57:59):
Well, you know, that's just sensible.

Speaker 3 (58:02):
Oh but quickly before we move off of the symbolic
understanding thing, Weisberg the language is clearly the most important
type of symbolic skills in human culture. Language is not
the only symbolic skill practice 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

(58:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
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 as symboled 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

(58:59):
space into a kind of map or a miniaturized world.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
Totally. Okay, one more thing before we wrap up Part one.
Here is Weissberg's exploration of the link between pretend play
and counter factual reasoning. So counterfactual reasoning is reasoning based

(59:26):
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

(59:53):
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.

(01:00:15):
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

(01:00:37):
experiment where a kid watches a toy mouse go down
a little forked slide and then answers questions about it.
And 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

(01:00:59):
a hypothetic 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

(01:01:21):
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 blue Cheetos thing. Reasoning based on
a counterfactual premise. So you can say something like, imagine
a world where cats bark instead of meowing. In this world,

(01:01:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
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

(01:02:40):
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

(01:03:03):
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

(01:03:24):
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,

(01:03:50):
Some researchers have argued that the adaptive function of pretend
play is exactly this about counterfactual reasoning. It's to prepare
children for serious counter factual reasoning later in life. And
I want to emphasize that counterfactual reasoning is not just
like high falutin philosophical thought experiments or you know, it's
not just on that level. I mean, we engage in

(01:04:11):
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

(01:04:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:43):
Yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
There's a line and I figure which Cormick McCarthy book,
But there's a character pondering all the worse luck their
bad luck might have saved them from.

Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
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 certainly 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

(01:05:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
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,
if not extended periods.

Speaker 3 (01:05:58):
I don't know what this says about me, but really no,
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.

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
How about air drums?

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:06:25):
Interesting Like if in the air tonight place, you're definitely
gonna go do the.

Speaker 3 (01:06:31):
Yeah yeah, all the films, the fills in a gottadavida,
the drum solo. I cannot listen to that drum solo
without acting it out.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
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 took my hands in my pockets.

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
Don't let it hold you back now.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
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

(01:07:14):
are not exposed to those sorts of telephones. They're seeing
smartphones that look more like TV remote controls.

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):
That's interesting. Well, you know this in the paper, it
was the bananas phone that was often cited. But I
was using the example of the remotest phone because that
is what happens in our house.

Speaker 1 (01:07:32):
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 grownups 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.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Pretend to Play is funnier when the reach is farther
and when the literal object is food.

Speaker 1 (01:07:56):
Yes, because the food the food technology gap is greater,
right yeah, and it you know, to get in 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

(01:08:16):
know we can?

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
So how do I put this on speaker?

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
Yeah? Yeah, all right, That's all I got. Those are
the only follow up questions I did.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:08:31):
That's right, Bring your imaginary friend and we'll have a
good old time, all right. In the meantime, we're just
going to remind you stuff to blow your mind, primarily
a science and culture podcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, those
are the core episode of publication. Dates. On Fridays, we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. On Wednesdays, we bust
out a short form episode and yeah, that's generally how

(01:08:53):
it works. If you're on Instagram, follow us at stb
ym podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:08:58):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
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