The present study examined what makes an act a pretense one for adults and preschoolers. Participants watched pretense versus real acts, judged whether each act was pretend or real, and justified their judgment by citing the cues they used. These reported cues are presumed to reflect viewers’ conception of what makes an act a pretense one. The results suggested that like adults, 5-year-olds represented pretense behavior in the form of contrasts between pretense and its real counterpart. However, children placed greater weight on deviant content than on behavioral cues, whereas adults used behavioral cues, especially movement, when content information was not available. These results are discussed in terms of how children’s intuitive theories of pretense might differ from those of adults. 1. Introduction Pretense is one of the earliest symbolic activities of young humans. In pretending, a child projects a mental representation onto reality, in a spirit of fun; the projection is done intentionally and with full awareness, and is often (but not always) accompanied by activities [1]. For example, a boy might take a stick and project onto it his mental representation of a horse, proceeding to “gallop” around with the stick. Children begin to engage in pretend play at around 12 months, and their pretense activities become more elaborate as they move into the central pretend play years of 3 to 5 [2–5]. Adults also engage in various forms of make believe, from pretending a spoon is an airplane in front of their young children to acting on a stage [6, 7]. Given the prevalence of pretense throughout the lifespan, an intriguing question is how people, especially young children, make pretense interpretations. Pretense involves distortions of the real world. If a young child reads a pretense event literally, his or her developing representations of the real world might get confused [8]. Thus, it is vital that young children interpret pretense in its nonliteral mode and distinguish it from what is real. The goal of this research is to examine how well children, as compared to adults, discriminate certain pretense and real acts and on what basis they think they make their judgments. The findings have the potential to provide insight into how young children’s intuitive theories of pretense might differ from those of adults. Pretense acts differ from real ones in both underlying intentions and external manifestations. Children from ages 3 to 5 are developing an understanding of the former difference, namely, the underlying intentions that are essential in defining
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