MAKE-BELIEVE PLAY: THE ABILITY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN REALITY AND IMAGINATION
Keywords:
Theory of mind, Make-believe, Reality, ImaginationAbstract
Leslie (1988b) argues that lhe ability to pretend and to
understand pretense in others, requires mastery of the same logical
structures required to understand mental states. Early pretend play is
actually a primitive manifestation of the child's theory of mind and emerges
usually between 18 and 24 months. The aim of this study was to analyse
among orphanage children, children from low socio-economic-status and
middle socio-economic-status children, the capacity to differenciate
between an imaginary and the real world. For this, the pretend play task
aplied by Leslie (1987) was used. The results showed that this pretend
play emerges only at 4 years of age among orphanage children and at 3
years of age among low socio-economic-status children. However, middle
socio-economic-status children show this kind of play at 2 years of age as
do the English children studied by Leslie (1987). The data are contrary to
the innate module that suggests that the mechanisms related to the theory
of mind emerge at the same ages and are universal. Instead our data
show they seem to be attributable to differences in experience.
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