Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 2: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
Speaker 2: and today we're going to begin a series of episodes
Speaker 2: looking at the topic of pretend play. And yes, folks,
Speaker 2: this is one of my baby Looked at You topics,
Speaker 2: inspired directly by watching my currently two year old daughter's
Speaker 2: wonderful and frightening brain become ever more powerful day by day. Lately,
Speaker 2: she has been all about pretending. Sometimes it is pretending
Speaker 2: to be things. Robert, I can't remember if I told
Speaker 2: you about the Christmas Elf. Do you know the Christmas Elf?
Speaker 1: Do I know the Christmas self? Well, there are many elves.
Speaker 2: This is different than the one on the shelf. This
Speaker 2: is so my daughter pretends to be this thing called
Speaker 2: the Christmas Elf, which mostly just like makes a grotesque
Speaker 2: kind of gargoyle face and dances wildly to black Sabbath.
Speaker 2: That's what Christmas elf is.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, you're bringing her up right then. That seems
Speaker 1: that seems more in keeping with some of the more
Speaker 1: archaic forms of elf that we've discussed on the show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. Knowing me, that may sound like
Speaker 2: a trained behavior, but this is just what naturally emerged
Speaker 2: from her. I don't know where she got that. That's
Speaker 2: what Christmas elf is. She's like data put on Black
Speaker 2: Sabbath record, but it runs around, dance into that. And
Speaker 2: then one of the good pretending to be things the
Speaker 2: other day was she was she's been playing with some
Speaker 2: little little doggies that she got for Christmas, little doggie toys,
Speaker 2: and one of them is a bagle, so she you know,
Speaker 2: she likes talking about the beagle and hearing about the beagle.
Speaker 2: But she was talking to Rachel the other day and
Speaker 2: she I think she was saying wolf wolf and Rachel said, oh,
Speaker 2: are you a beagle right now? And she said, no,
Speaker 2: tater tot. Very still, I don't know what exactly are
Speaker 2: the properties one mimics when being a tater Todd that
Speaker 2: I can't fully inhabit that mindset, but I admire the ambition.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess it is of the various fried and
Speaker 1: or baked potato food products. So it's the tater tots
Speaker 1: are the most canine of the bunch, So sure, yeah.
Speaker 2: But a lot of it is. So there's a little
Speaker 2: bit of pretending to be things. But a lot more
Speaker 2: of it is what when we get into the research
Speaker 2: later in this episode, is what is sometimes called replica play.
Speaker 2: It is pretending with the aid of toys or props,
Speaker 2: little agent toys, and making them pretend to do things.
Speaker 2: So she's got a bunch of dinosaurs, and she loves
Speaker 2: to make her dinosaurs go night night, and then rapidly
Speaker 2: wake up and then go night night again, over and
Speaker 2: over in like a mind rendingly fast circadian rhythm. She
Speaker 2: loves to have our little dinosaurs and creatures eat pizza.
Speaker 2: And there's a lot of discussion of to what extent
Speaker 2: there's sharing the pizza or not, or to what extent
Speaker 2: they're keeping pieces of pizza to themselves. Sometimes they're eating
Speaker 2: things that you can see there's like a physical prop
Speaker 2: for the food. Sometimes they're just eating purely imagine everything.
Speaker 2: So there's cake there that's invisible cake. And then the
Speaker 2: past few days she's been into going on a boat
Speaker 2: on the couch, which is a book on the couch cushion.
Speaker 2: The couch cushion is the water and the book is
Speaker 2: the boat, and she puts various things on the boat
Speaker 2: and they get on and off the boat and see
Speaker 2: things out on the water, and typically they're on a
Speaker 2: boat trip to grandparents' house.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, it's a magical time. My own child is
Speaker 1: twelve going on thirteen now, so a lot of these
Speaker 1: really awesome examples of imagination play are in the past now,
Speaker 1: but my wife and I certainly look back on them
Speaker 1: with a lot of funness, and some of them are
Speaker 1: still things we frequently discuss in our you know, day
Speaker 1: to day conversations, even a reference rather. But yeah, I remember,
Speaker 1: I remember various antics with these, like old plastic dinosaur
Speaker 1: toys from my childhood, and so those would eat those
Speaker 1: dinosaurs were always eating things. I can't remember how much
Speaker 1: of it was real, how much of it was imagined.
Speaker 1: And they wouldn't so much go to sleep as they
Speaker 1: would occasionally go extinct. There was some sort of a
Speaker 1: cosmic event that would make them all go extinct, but
Speaker 1: you know then they'd be back up and running before
Speaker 1: too long.
Speaker 2: That's intense pretend. Yeah, yeah, facing the realities of nature
Speaker 2: head on.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, you tell the story of the dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: you gotta tell the beginning, the middle of the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Look, ma, these are evolving into birds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. Well, we did touch on that aspect
Speaker 1: of it too, but we also inevitably or I inevitably
Speaker 1: ended up sort of busting out these sort of childhood
Speaker 1: version of dinosaurs that I had growing up, which was
Speaker 1: less about the bird thing and more about just catastrophic
Speaker 1: fireballs and so forth and exploding volcanoes. We've referenced before that,
Speaker 1: like almost all of those old paleo art paleo art
Speaker 1: examples from childhood dinosaur books of like the late seventies
Speaker 1: and the nineteen eighties, they all had an erupting volcano
Speaker 1: in the background, so.
Speaker 2: It's actively erupting at the moment.
Speaker 1: And it was kind of implied or I always thought like,
Speaker 1: that's the end back there. It's what's happening. It's the
Speaker 1: end of days for the dinosaurs.
Speaker 2: I think it's important to get both visions. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: you get the long scale evolutionary EON's point of view,
Speaker 2: and then you also get the scary part of fantasia
Speaker 2: of you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I'm excited about these episodes though, getting into
Speaker 1: imagination play. It's a topic that you know, I think
Speaker 1: we've touched on before on the show, at least in passing.
Speaker 1: There may be some very old episodes that deal with
Speaker 1: some of the issues we're going to bring up here,
Speaker 1: But it's going to be nice to really dive into
Speaker 1: all of this.
Speaker 2: A new yeah, And I'm not sure yet how many
Speaker 2: episodes we're going to go to in this series. We're
Speaker 2: looking at least two, but maybe three or more if
Speaker 2: the topic takes us there. But this is a rich subject.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of scientific research in this area, but
Speaker 2: also just a lot of interesting philosophical thought going back centuries.
Speaker 2: So there's going to be a lot to get into.
Speaker 2: But I thought a good place to start would just
Speaker 2: be a good broad sort of overview paper looking at
Speaker 2: the subject from a psychology, cognitive science, and child development
Speaker 2: point of view. And I found a good paper in
Speaker 2: that regard by Dina Skolnik Weisberg, published in the journal
Speaker 2: Cognitive Science in twenty fifteen called Pretend Play and so, Rob,
Speaker 2: if you're ready, I thought we should just go ahead
Speaker 2: and dive right into this paper and talk about some
Speaker 2: of the topics brought up in it, some of the
Speaker 2: research covered, and then we can branch out from there.
Speaker 1: All right, let's do it.
Speaker 2: So we start with definitions. Weisberg defines pretend play as
Speaker 2: any playful behavior that involves non literal action, so to paraphrase,
Speaker 2: play that operates on the premise of a thing or
Speaker 2: situation being other than what it literally is. So there
Speaker 2: are types of play that are not pretend to play.
Speaker 2: You can think of a game of tag or a
Speaker 2: game of kickball. This is clearly play, but it's not
Speaker 2: really pretend to play because what you're I mean, you
Speaker 2: could imagine versions that involve pretend elements, but at the baseline,
Speaker 2: this is a game that is taken literally. What the
Speaker 2: children mostly think they're doing is playing the literal game.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like a game of kickball is just a
Speaker 1: game of kickball unless you do what I do distinctly
Speaker 1: remember doing when I was a kid, is pretending that
Speaker 1: kickball with some sort of like sci fi gladiatorial combats anario,
Speaker 1: you know, and imagine kids are probably doing some molre
Speaker 1: things today, like imagining it's squid games, and so I
Speaker 1: guess it depends on the age, but you know, dreaming
Speaker 1: it up a little bit, adding that layer of imagination
Speaker 1: on top of it.
Speaker 2: I recall specifically doing this with tag because I enjoyed
Speaker 2: playing tag a lot, and my friends and I in
Speaker 2: elementary school age played tag, but I remember I would
Speaker 2: spice it up mentally, sometimes with the cooperation of others
Speaker 2: or maybe just in my own mind, by imagining myself
Speaker 2: and other players as characters from movies I liked in
Speaker 2: the context of tag. So like, I just saw the
Speaker 2: movie Anaconda starring Ice Cube and Jenni Phi Lopez, you know,
Speaker 2: and and I am now pretending to be this character
Speaker 2: from Anaconda as we play tag. You know, I was
Speaker 2: probably that was probably too mature of a movie for
Speaker 2: me at that point.
Speaker 1: But we need to come back to Anaconda on a
Speaker 1: weirdest cinema.
Speaker 2: By the way, it's it's so good, one of the
Speaker 2: most unhinged performances of all time John Voyd in that movie.
Speaker 1: All right, right, so I think everybody gets where we're
Speaker 1: going with this. Yeah, it's like there's like basically like
Speaker 1: pure sport is not imaginative.
Speaker 2: And then there are other kinds of play that once
Speaker 2: again could break down either way. So building with blocks
Speaker 2: could be pretend to play on how you're playing, but
Speaker 2: it isn't necessarily you might just be building with blocks.
Speaker 2: And so sometimes when I build with blocks with my daughter,
Speaker 2: the impression I get is that it's just about building
Speaker 2: with blocks. You know, she wants to build a big tower,
Speaker 2: make a bunch of blocks. But if you think about
Speaker 2: it as we are building a skyscraper and there are
Speaker 2: going to be people living inside it and so forth,
Speaker 2: then I guess it is pretend play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like you get into some of the bigger kid
Speaker 1: uses of Legos. For example, I remember doing this, and
Speaker 1: I've seen my child do this as well, where you
Speaker 1: are really almost creating an imaginative fetish item out of
Speaker 1: the out of the blocks. You know, it's some sort
Speaker 1: of a character or a creature or you know, in
Speaker 1: my case it was often some sort of a robot
Speaker 1: or a mech suit, you know, whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1: And it is about connecting blocks together and building something,
Speaker 1: making a form. But then you were like filling that
Speaker 1: form with more meaning via your imagination.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. But okay, so here's where like clear pretend
Speaker 2: play comes in. When my child picks up an old
Speaker 2: DVD player remote control that we took the batteries out
Speaker 2: of and holds it up to her ear and says
Speaker 2: that she is calling her grandmother on the phone, that's
Speaker 2: definitely pretend to play. At some level, she knows the
Speaker 2: remote is not a phone, and you know, Nana does
Speaker 2: not talk back to her, but she likes to pretend
Speaker 2: and thinks it's very funny.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, my child also did a lot of phone
Speaker 1: pretend play as well, picking up various items, remote controls, blocks,
Speaker 1: what have you, pretending their phones.
Speaker 2: So that's a pretty clear case. Coming back to more
Speaker 2: ambiguous cases. Oh, one that I think is huge is
Speaker 2: like play fighting. Play fighting could be non pretend to play.
Speaker 2: It could be understood as just literally a form of
Speaker 2: kind of free form wrestling competition between children or kids
Speaker 2: engaging in play fighting might be assuming the non literal
Speaker 2: form of characters and a scenario.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my mind here instantly goes to lightsaber fighting because
Speaker 1: my own child did a lot of this and it
Speaker 1: took different forms. Right, Because if you're gonna pretend to
Speaker 1: fight with lightsabers, you can have a full like official
Speaker 1: lightsaber toy with an extendable plastic cone that serves as
Speaker 1: the blade of the lightsaber or laser sort if you will.
Speaker 1: And but then you then you can have just a
Speaker 1: pre made hilt that you're pretending there is a light
Speaker 1: blade emanating from you can do what my child did
Speaker 1: and take foil like roll of foil, roll of saran
Speaker 1: wrap tubes, little cardboard tubes, dress those up as lightsaber hilts,
Speaker 1: and then you're fighting with those, pretending again that the
Speaker 1: blade is there. Or you can do what I think
Speaker 1: a lot of kids do, is you just pretend the
Speaker 1: hilt is there as well, so I can draw a
Speaker 1: lightsaber right now and just go and you know, you
Speaker 1: know exactly what I have in my hand, and you
Speaker 1: can engage in battles, and so they are like different
Speaker 1: levels of having any kind of like actual physical property
Speaker 1: there to play off off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. So you can imagine there's sort of
Speaker 2: different levels of extension of the imagination depending on what
Speaker 2: physical props you're using, or how far away the situation
Speaker 2: or scenario or object you're imagining is from the physical reality.
Speaker 2: So you know, there's a sort of greater imaginative leap
Speaker 2: involved in taking a paper towel tube and saying that's
Speaker 2: a lightsaber than holding like a toy painted up to
Speaker 2: look like a real lightsaber and saying that's a real lightsaber.
Speaker 2: Both involve some imagination, but one kind of is a
Speaker 2: bigger leap and then it's even a bigger leap to
Speaker 2: take nothing at all. Just you know, you're completely imagining
Speaker 2: the presence of a prop in any case, and say
Speaker 2: that's the lightsaber.
Speaker 1: And then is it me with the lightsaber to your point?
Speaker 1: Or am i obi wan? Am i anakin? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: so forth. So yeah, there's so many different levels of
Speaker 1: the imagination to employ here.
Speaker 2: So the purpose of this review by Weisberg was to
Speaker 2: define pretend play, to differentiate it from other types of
Speaker 2: playful activities, and then to kind of look at ways
Speaker 2: that pretend to play fits into the development of various
Speaker 2: cognitive and social skills in childhood. And since pretend play
Speaker 2: seems to involve many of the same mental structures as
Speaker 2: complex adult capacities like counterfactual reasoning, theory of mind, symbolic understanding,
Speaker 2: and so forth, looking at pretend to play really could
Speaker 2: help us better understand many aspects of the brain and
Speaker 2: the mind. So this review in particular looks at the
Speaker 2: relationship between pretend play and symbolic understanding, theory of mind,
Speaker 2: and counterfactual reasoning. I think we might save at least
Speaker 2: one of those. I think the deeper exploration of theory
Speaker 2: of mind for part two, because that gets into a
Speaker 2: lot of other stuff. But I'm going to try to
Speaker 2: talk about symbolic understanding and counterfactual reasoning today. But the
Speaker 2: author kicks things off by trying to define and characterize
Speaker 2: pretend to play itself. Now, even going back a step,
Speaker 2: not just pretend to play, but play as a concept,
Speaker 2: has proven notoriously difficult for researchers. There's like a whole
Speaker 2: literature arguing over what play is, what definition best captures
Speaker 2: the essence of play, What do we mean when we
Speaker 2: call something play, Which types of edge cases count and
Speaker 2: which do not. So play is just extremely variable from
Speaker 2: child to child, across different cultures. Different people look at
Speaker 2: the same activity and say that is play. No, that's
Speaker 2: not play. So there's really no way to draw a
Speaker 2: clean boundary around this concept that everybody's going to accept.
Speaker 2: You will just have to sit with the fact that
Speaker 2: some people are going to say, no, I don't agree
Speaker 2: that that's what play.
Speaker 1: Is, right, And this is going to kind of continue
Speaker 1: through our whole analysis of pretend play, because there's going
Speaker 1: to be a lot of going back and forth. Well,
Speaker 1: while some researchers say this classifies as such and such
Speaker 1: and others disagree. Yeah, it just depends how you tease
Speaker 1: it apart.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's certainly the case. I mean, we are in
Speaker 2: the higher order sciences. We're more in the realm of
Speaker 2: psychology and cognitive science and a lot of things. They're
Speaker 2: just not as clean as they are in chemistry. Now,
Speaker 2: one of the main criteria that seems to be common
Speaker 2: to definitions of play is that it is what Weisberg
Speaker 2: calls non instrumental activity, meaning it has no immediate goal
Speaker 2: or purpose other than enjoyment. So you might actually enjoy
Speaker 2: something that is not play. Maybe you enjoy splitting logs
Speaker 2: into firewood. But even if you do, most people would
Speaker 2: not think of splitting wood as play because it has
Speaker 2: an immediate functional goal. It's about transforming resources into a
Speaker 2: more usable form. So even if I don't know, you
Speaker 2: bring a spirit of playfulness to your log splitting and
Speaker 2: you really enjoyed the activity, most people don't look at
Speaker 2: that and say that is play.
Speaker 1: This is really interesting to think about this distinction, because
Speaker 1: you know, I catch myself as what I like to
Speaker 1: think is a pretty pro play adult, rationalizing that some
Speaker 1: of my hobbies like many painting, for instance, rationalizing it
Speaker 1: on the basis that, well, this is going to result
Speaker 1: in something that can be utilized in another activity, generally
Speaker 1: a social activity, and therefore it's not like there's not
Speaker 1: this huge sunk cost to it, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: a big waste of time, which you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of false thinking and all of that, I think.
Speaker 1: And likewise, yeah, you know, I've often thought about, or
Speaker 1: at least I've thought about this more over the last
Speaker 1: ten years or so, about how, you know, especially in
Speaker 1: a very capitalist society, I think a lot of us
Speaker 1: end up buying into this corrupting notion that if we're
Speaker 1: good at some thing, if we or even if we
Speaker 1: just enjoy something, if it brings us pleasure, well, then
Speaker 1: shouldn't we be generating some profits off of our love
Speaker 1: or our talent or what have you? You know, And
Speaker 1: I should add the caveat you know, and there's nothing,
Speaker 1: absolutely nothing wrong with turning your passion, your hobby, your
Speaker 1: talent into a career or a side hustle making a
Speaker 1: few bucks off of it here and there, even if
Speaker 1: you're just sort of paying for part of that hobby. Certainly, yeah,
Speaker 1: go wild. But we should also feel free to play
Speaker 1: without having to deal with this inner voice saying, well,
Speaker 1: you're not good enough at it unless you can somehow
Speaker 1: transition that fun over into a profit. You know that
Speaker 1: that any time spent having fun, anytime spent playing, is
Speaker 1: like just wasted time. You know, it's okay to engage
Speaker 1: in passions that pay only in fun, you know, or
Speaker 1: maybe socialization. And this is a huge one for me too,
Speaker 1: that I distinctly remember somebody sharing this with me several
Speaker 1: years back, that you know, it's okay not to be
Speaker 1: perfect at your passions and hobbies. You know, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of times, like without even thinking about, without
Speaker 1: even rationalizing that like out loud in our or or
Speaker 1: you know, at a higher level of consciousness, you know,
Speaker 1: we still sort of buy into this idea that it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm a grown up. If I'm doing if I'm engaging
Speaker 1: in play, well then can I turn this into a business?
Speaker 1: Can I make it? You know? Can I somehow rationalize
Speaker 1: it through the almighty dollar so that that ends up
Speaker 1: being how far removed we are, as often are as
Speaker 1: adults from like the pure childhood essence of play.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I fully agree with all that. In fact, you know,
Speaker 2: people you may have heard some version of this advice before.
Speaker 2: But I would go against the grain with with people
Speaker 2: who say, you know, find a way to get paid
Speaker 2: for doing what you love, or you know, it's like,
Speaker 2: take your passion and turn that into a job, because
Speaker 2: that may mean that every day you get to do
Speaker 2: what you love, or it may mean that what is
Speaker 2: something that you used to love just gets turned into
Speaker 2: a chore.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, and you know, certainly you hear stories about
Speaker 1: people who seem perfectly content with turning their passion into
Speaker 1: their job. But you also hear plenty of stories about
Speaker 1: people who have the reverse situation, or the thing that
Speaker 1: you still love has now become the thing they have
Speaker 1: to do every day.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I guess nobody can figure it out for
Speaker 2: you whether that's going to be true in your case
Speaker 2: or not. So you'll just have to experiment, but be
Speaker 2: aware that that does happen.
Speaker 1: But this is not a problem that the children.
Speaker 2: Have correct though. I do want to stress while we're
Speaker 2: here that though we most often associate play with childhood,
Speaker 2: I think I've said on the show before that I
Speaker 2: think play is the work of childhood. When children are playing,
Speaker 2: they're doing their job. It does extend through the entire lifespan.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's clear that even adults going all throughout
Speaker 2: the lifetime engage in different types of play. There are games,
Speaker 2: there's word play, construction play, role playing of various kinds.
Speaker 2: So you know it doesn't stop after childhood, but clearly
Speaker 2: childhood is the most intensive period of play in life. Now,
Speaker 2: pretend play specifically has an extended definition that takes it
Speaker 2: beyond just play generally, and Weisberg summarizes it as follows quote,
Speaker 2: pretend play crucially involves some form of representation or acting
Speaker 2: as if such that the behaviors or actions that take
Speaker 2: place in a pretend game are not meant to literally
Speaker 2: reflect reality. So there is some extent to which what
Speaker 2: happens in pretend play is understood by the people playing
Speaker 2: to not be literally real. Now, there are a lot
Speaker 2: of different types of pretend play, and I got interested
Speaker 2: in the taxonomy of these play These almost like family
Speaker 2: trees of play type. And one that is very familiar
Speaker 2: to most people is object substitution pretend. This is treating
Speaker 2: one object as if it were another. So we already
Speaker 2: mentioned the remote control is a telephone. It can't actually
Speaker 2: place calls, but you hold it up to your head,
Speaker 2: you say hello, you say ring ring, you pretend to
Speaker 2: call your grandmother whatever.
Speaker 1: Another one that I have to mention is, of course
Speaker 1: stick is a gun. This one. I remember encountering this
Speaker 1: one a lot on the playground. Generally, you'd have like
Speaker 1: one group of children in my recollection, you know, playing peacefully,
Speaker 1: doing something cute, and then here come another band of
Speaker 1: children and they have sticks, and then they start firing
Speaker 1: sticks as if they are guns. Always a hot discussion
Speaker 1: on parenting forums. So get ready for that one, Joe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know that's coming. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: I don't want I mean, I'm not thrilled about the
Speaker 2: idea of sticks as guns. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: I don't want to totally demonize conflict play. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think there's probably some healthy amount of kind of
Speaker 2: you know, the non bullying forms of kind of play
Speaker 2: fighting and stuff that can be okay. But there's also
Speaker 2: like a you know, a caretaking play, you know, treating
Speaker 2: the treating the little plastic dinosaur as a baby.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Often a lot of I remember, a lot
Speaker 1: of food preparation and foraging play.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. In fact, tying into
Speaker 2: Christmas pretend play experience is just just recently, Yeah, my
Speaker 2: daughter has been big into making pretend food for her
Speaker 2: for her babies and dinosaurs and everything to eat. And
Speaker 2: the making of the pretend food is so chaotic, it's
Speaker 2: truly marvelous. Like, you know, there's a little pretend pot,
Speaker 2: and into it goes the box of rice with the
Speaker 2: box and a banana and a hot dog and a
Speaker 2: you know, and grapes and everything, and you're just imagining
Speaker 2: all of this together and it's like, do you think
Speaker 2: that would taste good? Yeah? Yeah, But to jump out
Speaker 2: of the pretend mindset for a second. One thing that
Speaker 2: Weissberg sort of specifies about object substitution play is that
Speaker 2: in this kind of play, actions that are directed toward
Speaker 2: the object do not actually affect the object in the
Speaker 2: intended way. They take place, you know, within what is
Speaker 2: called a pretend world or a pretend frame. So when
Speaker 2: the child pretends to cook pretend food in a you know,
Speaker 2: in a toy pod or something, the food does not
Speaker 2: actually get heated to the point of boiling or whatever.
Speaker 2: There's just generally a pretend logic of the effects of
Speaker 2: actions upon the object that is substituted. Now coming back
Speaker 2: to a question we raised earlier. Sometimes it is not
Speaker 2: clear if a play behavior is pretend play or just
Speaker 2: literal play. Like we brought up the idea of a
Speaker 2: child building with blocks, so they're building a big stack
Speaker 2: of blocks. Are they just building a big stack of blocks,
Speaker 2: or are they pretending to build a structure that people
Speaker 2: live inside. Sometimes the distinction could be blurry and fluid,
Speaker 2: easily switching back and forth between the literal frame and
Speaker 2: the pretend frame. For you know, in one minute, it
Speaker 2: might be just a stack of blocks. The next minute, oh,
Speaker 2: it is a building full of people. Then they might
Speaker 2: forget it's a building full of people and it's just
Speaker 2: blocks again. And this problem of temporal switching between literal
Speaker 2: play and pretend play can of course create difficulties for
Speaker 2: researchers who want to study this same distinction with play fighting, right, like,
Speaker 2: are we literally just wrestling? Or am I Dwayne the
Speaker 2: Rock Johnson and your Jason Stathum or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting to think about how the switches back
Speaker 1: and forth not only with kids, but as adults. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, you can think of something like writing. You know,
Speaker 1: at times writing can take on a feeling of play,
Speaker 1: you know where you're losing yourself in an imaginative exercise.
Speaker 1: But then oh, you've got to stop and do a
Speaker 1: little grammar or a little bit of it work. I
Speaker 1: guess nowadays, are you in the old days, it would
Speaker 1: have been oh, now I have to fix the typewriter.
Speaker 1: You know, there are various tasks we engage in well
Speaker 1: shift gears on us. Now.
Speaker 2: One question is when does this happen in childhood? The
Speaker 2: answer is it varies, but pretend play behavior most often
Speaker 2: starts to appear around eighteen months old or so, though
Speaker 2: there's variation in the timeline, so you know, sometimes it's earlier,
Speaker 2: sometimes it's later. Usually the earliest form of pretend play
Speaker 2: observed is what we were just talking about. Its object substitution,
Speaker 2: pretending an object is something else. Now, interesting question is
Speaker 2: why does that come first, to come before these other
Speaker 2: types of pretend play that I'm about to get into.
Speaker 2: Maybe we can come back to that later. A variation
Speaker 2: on object substitution is what you already mentioned, with the
Speaker 2: sort of the receding physical prop concept of the lightsaber
Speaker 2: arising usually in early preschool years maybe meaning around two
Speaker 2: to three years old. Is object substitution involving invisible or
Speaker 2: non existent objects. So usually you get with a prop
Speaker 2: object substitution first. That might start around eighteen months or so,
Speaker 2: and then you know, in the next couple of years,
Speaker 2: you can get fully pretend phone. So it's not like
Speaker 2: I'm holding a remote and pretending it's a phone. There's
Speaker 2: nothing in my hand, but I have a phone and
Speaker 2: I'm calling grandmother. Also in the early preschool years, Weisberg
Speaker 2: says that kids start to make a distinction between two
Speaker 2: different things. They distinguish between what's called enactment play versus
Speaker 2: replica play, and so the difference goes like this, enactment
Speaker 2: play is like I dress up like Dad and pretend
Speaker 2: to cook dinner like him, possibly involving props. You know,
Speaker 2: you might have a play kitchen and toy utensils and
Speaker 2: food or not involving these props, just doing it with
Speaker 2: the invisible but I am the one pretending with my
Speaker 2: body to be the something else. Versus replica play is
Speaker 2: I have my doll cook dinner in a tiny kitchen
Speaker 2: in the dollhouse. Both are forms of pretend play, but
Speaker 2: in enactment play, the child is themself playing the part,
Speaker 2: and in replica play the child makes a physical avatar
Speaker 2: like a doll play the part now springboarding off of that,
Speaker 2: the paper gets into something that we may put off
Speaker 2: because I don't know if you want to say something
Speaker 2: about this now, Robb, or if you just want to
Speaker 2: save it for part two. But it does get into
Speaker 2: imaginary companions as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, largely we'll save that for the next episode. But
Speaker 1: I will like briefly mention that you know you can
Speaker 1: still you can still get into distinctions of what is
Speaker 1: an imaginary friend, what is an imaginary companion, and how
Speaker 1: sometimes personified objects are seen as examples of imaginary companions.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's one of these things where it's
Speaker 1: easy to think, oh, imaginary friend, that's a that's a
Speaker 1: definitely one thing. It's definitely an invisible counterpart that a
Speaker 1: child has this imagined relationship with. But when you get
Speaker 1: into the particularly I was looking at one meta analysis
Speaker 1: that I'll reference in the next episode. It it gets
Speaker 1: a little more complex than that, and there are different
Speaker 1: ways of again teasing it apart.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sometimes there's a prop there too, Like a classic
Speaker 2: example is Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes. This is a
Speaker 2: understood to be in physical reality a stuffed animal, but
Speaker 2: it is imagined by the child to be an entity
Speaker 2: with a consistent personality that the child interacts with over time,
Speaker 2: in which case it really is sort of a form
Speaker 2: of imaginary companion, even though there is a physically existing prop.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and sometimes that prop I was reading, you know,
Speaker 1: it can actually seem to enhance the imaginative aspect. So
Speaker 1: you know, it might be tempting to think about it
Speaker 1: in the reverse and think, well, this is here to
Speaker 1: sort of stand in for imagination, but no, it can
Speaker 1: often enhance it. And you know, man, you can go
Speaker 1: wild with just that concept alone thinking about you know,
Speaker 1: examples of you know, various physical representations of deities and
Speaker 1: fantastic beings and creatures, and you know, in many cases
Speaker 1: beings and entities thought to have some level of reality
Speaker 1: to you know, adult human practitioners of various religions and
Speaker 1: so forth throughout time, and even down to various knick
Speaker 1: knacks and toys that grown folks may have on their
Speaker 1: deaths at home or in the office. You know, an
Speaker 1: avatar of Godzilla, you know that maybe enhances the reality
Speaker 1: of Godzilla.
Speaker 2: There's a concept Weisberg mentions in this paper that we
Speaker 2: may want to come back to when we do the
Speaker 2: full thing on imaginary companions. But it is the idea
Speaker 2: of paracosms, meaning quote, imaginary worlds occupied by many pretend
Speaker 2: entities and subject to their own internal rules. So I
Speaker 2: think that's sort of like extending the concept of an
Speaker 2: imaginary companion to more like a whole world of potential
Speaker 2: imaginary companions. That you know, it's like a different world
Speaker 2: that has its own rules and its own inhabitants, and
Speaker 2: I have imaginary access to it.
Speaker 1: Wow, the unseen world. Yeah, I mean, it is almost
Speaker 1: times startling to think about how closely all of this
Speaker 1: mirrors the more sort of we often think, you know,
Speaker 1: complex systems of the real and the imagined, the real
Speaker 1: and the mythic and so forth that adults have. Like
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, it's already there, or at least
Speaker 1: it's already well coming together at a very early age.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And actually that brings us to the next
Speaker 2: thing from this paper I wanted to talk about, which
Speaker 2: is the distinction between pretend and reality. So, for most children,
Speaker 2: the peak density of pretend play is observed between the
Speaker 2: ages of three and five, though, as we've seen it
Speaker 2: starts earlier than that, and it really extends all throughout
Speaker 2: life in more limited ways. But between three and five
Speaker 2: is when most kids are doing the most pretending. There's
Speaker 2: a lot going on, and so when that's happening, adults
Speaker 2: around these children often find themselves wondering can kids tell
Speaker 2: the difference between fantasy and reality? It's a kind of
Speaker 2: natural thing for parents to start. I don't know, I
Speaker 2: don't know if most parents actually worry about it, but
Speaker 2: to at least kind of wonder, like, do they understand
Speaker 2: this isn't real? And though I think there are very
Speaker 2: natural reasons that adults wonder or even worry about this,
Speaker 2: Weisberg says that the research shows yes, generally, even quite
Speaker 2: young children have no trouble distinguishing between pretend facts and
Speaker 2: real facts, and by a round age four, most children
Speaker 2: can explain that what happens in the pretend play is
Speaker 2: not quote real. It seems that children do make more
Speaker 2: pretense reality confusion errors than adults, but they're still usually
Speaker 2: aware of the difference.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean can It's understandable that as parents we
Speaker 1: can be overprotective, overly protective, and we may we'll at
Speaker 1: least sometimes question it, and we'll think, well, did they
Speaker 1: really know what's real and what's not? What's to deal
Speaker 1: with this imaginary friend? Who is this imaginary friend? And
Speaker 1: then added on top of that, as I'll get into
Speaker 1: more next episode, is the Certainly, for a while, their
Speaker 1: imaginary friends were not seen as being a positive aspect
Speaker 1: of childhood development. They were seen as as as as
Speaker 1: a red flag. And uh, and I think there's still
Speaker 1: a legacy of that sort of in the popular mindset,
Speaker 1: you know, even though we've moved on from that view
Speaker 1: of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the stuff I was reading did not suggest imaginary
Speaker 2: companions were anything to worry about, and that they're extremely
Speaker 2: common somewhere. But depending on how you define it, somewhere
Speaker 2: between like a third to two thirds of kids under
Speaker 2: seven have them.
Speaker 1: Though it still can be weird when you hear about it.
Speaker 1: You know, you're like, oh, you have an imaginary friend,
Speaker 1: and you're speaking about them as if they're real, and
Speaker 1: you know, and part of that is we've you know
Speaker 1: a lot of us have seen too many horror movies,
Speaker 1: so that's where mind goes, you know. But no, it's
Speaker 1: there's there's absolutely nothing wrong with it according to the
Speaker 1: current research.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also studies of pretend to play have found
Speaker 2: that in general, children are quite good at what the
Speaker 2: author of this paper calls core unteening, which means that
Speaker 2: like causal or mechanical understandings from a pretend to game
Speaker 2: do not affect understandings in reality. So an example given
Speaker 2: in the paper is like a child will use a
Speaker 2: banana as a pretend telephone, and they can be really
Speaker 2: into this banana phone game, but it does not lead
Speaker 2: the child to believe that bananas can actually place calls
Speaker 2: or that real phones can be eaten. So they're able
Speaker 2: to quarantine the implications of the pretend game and not
Speaker 2: let that affect their understanding of how the world works.
Speaker 1: So that's one less thing you parents have to freak
Speaker 1: out about, is that pretend phone play will lead to
Speaker 1: the eating of phones and the the frenzied attempt to
Speaker 1: make calls on bananas.
Speaker 2: Now I was wondering, though. I mean, of course, there
Speaker 2: might be individual cases where there is something you know
Speaker 2: that's worth following up about, but in most cases it's
Speaker 2: not much to worry about. When kids are playing pretend,
Speaker 2: they actually can basically tell the difference. So why do
Speaker 2: adults worry about this. I think one reason might just
Speaker 2: be like the commitment with which children engage and pretend
Speaker 2: to play. It's a level of unself conscious gameness for
Speaker 2: enjoyment in a scenario that is difficult for adults to understand,
Speaker 2: even if they're adults who are still pretty well practiced
Speaker 2: and pretend play. Maybe you're an adult who does theater
Speaker 2: and does D and D and stuff, so you pretend
Speaker 2: a lot more than most adults do. Still, you probably
Speaker 2: cannot really get in the level of gameness for pretend
Speaker 2: that a child has.
Speaker 1: Well, they just do it so earnestly and unashamedly, and
Speaker 1: at the same time as adults. I feel like we
Speaker 1: often compartmentalize our imagine worlds and our dreaming. Either it
Speaker 1: is tied up with particular you know, acts and activities
Speaker 1: social or otherwise you know, creative endeavors, or we just
Speaker 1: kind of, like, I don't know, we can be very
Speaker 1: hypocritical when we think about it. You know, like we
Speaker 1: may be spending you know, a large portion of our
Speaker 1: days reverting into some sort of a fantasy world, be
Speaker 1: it something we've dreamt up or something that has been
Speaker 1: dreamt up by authors and artists and so forth. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a different scenario than to see it in the child.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, I think there is
Speaker 1: this or at least I'm speaking mostly for my own
Speaker 1: part here, but you know, as a parent, you look
Speaker 1: to your child, and especially during those early days, you
Speaker 1: really want to hold on to and appreciate these like
Speaker 1: this pure imagination and all of these, you know, various
Speaker 1: aspects of childhood. But at the same time, like you
Speaker 1: do want them to develop and grow, and you realize
Speaker 1: they will grow out of this and they will become
Speaker 1: ever become small adults, eventually entering into an adult world.
Speaker 1: So we're kind of like torn, you know, like we
Speaker 1: want them to change, but we the last thing we
Speaker 1: want is for them to change, yea. And it results
Speaker 1: probably in all sorts of again counterintuitive ideas and expectations.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and we can also be hypocritical in the
Speaker 1: way we judge things like the pursuit of fantasy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that tension is like one of the
Speaker 2: most classically I guess understood bittersweet things about being a parent. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's yeah, you want them to grow up, but you don't.
Speaker 1: And then at the same time, yeah, you can't help
Speaker 1: but be a bit anxious and worrying and like, well,
Speaker 1: will they ever know the difference between a banana and
Speaker 1: a phone? Is this permanent or is this just a
Speaker 1: kid thing now.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, to be fair, it is still
Speaker 2: found that children make more pretense reality distinction errors than
Speaker 2: adults do, and parents and other adult caregivers do see
Speaker 2: some instances where children really can't seem to tell the
Speaker 2: difference between imagination and reality, or where like something from
Speaker 2: the imagination infects their reality. An example given in the
Speaker 2: paper is like when an originally fun pretend monster game
Speaker 2: becomes scary to the child. So, you know, like you're
Speaker 2: running around playing monster Chase where mom is a monster
Speaker 2: and she's roaring and chasing the child around, and this
Speaker 2: is not a scary game to the child. The child
Speaker 2: thinks this is like very funny and very fun running around, laughing, squealing.
Speaker 2: But then maybe one time after this game, seemingly out
Speaker 2: of nowhere, the child becomes upset and says she's scared.
Speaker 2: She says, now she thinks there's a monster in her
Speaker 2: closet and she's scared to go to bed.
Speaker 1: I mean, I still do this to myself occasionally. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: that horror movie was fun till it wasn't.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, and it's not just fear. Also, you know,
Speaker 2: you can have like, oh, my toy kitty cat fell
Speaker 2: off the couch and she got hurt and now I'm
Speaker 2: actually sad. I'm like crying. So you know what's going
Speaker 2: on here? Well here, Weisberg doesn't fully know the answer,
Speaker 2: but refers to a couple of other short papers addressing
Speaker 2: this issue of like, what's happening when it seems like
Speaker 2: kids when the imagination infects the understanding of reality. And
Speaker 2: one of the papers was by an author named Ted Ruffman,
Speaker 2: published in the journal Developmental Science in two thousand and two,
Speaker 2: called Pretense Reality Confusions in Children and Adults. I went
Speaker 2: and looked this up, and I'll try to quickly summarize
Speaker 2: what Ruffman thinks, but it's addressing issues like when the
Speaker 2: pretend monster has suddenly become scary, and Ruffman says much
Speaker 2: along the lines you were saying, Rob, it's helpful to
Speaker 2: look at adult analogies to better understand what's going on.
Speaker 2: And one of the principles he brings up is availability
Speaker 2: or salience. You know, adults also get scared after watching
Speaker 2: a horror movie for fun, despite fully understanding that the
Speaker 2: movie is not real and cannot hurt them. So you
Speaker 2: just finished watching New Nos Faratu or something, and you
Speaker 2: don't want to go downstairs by yourself. Is it because
Speaker 2: you can't tell the difference between fiction and reality. Probably not.
Speaker 2: Ruffman argues that in instead, the fear caused by a
Speaker 2: fictional horror movie is probably due to a combination of
Speaker 2: number one emotion will come to that in a second,
Speaker 2: but also availability or salience, and in psychology these terms
Speaker 2: mean essentially increased awareness of something. So you know a
Speaker 2: horror movie even though you don't think the events of
Speaker 2: it are real, it just sort of puts front of
Speaker 2: mind for you the idea of deadly threats and threatening
Speaker 2: other worldly encounters, whether or not you think they're actually
Speaker 2: likely to happen to you. Now, it's just high in
Speaker 2: your awareness, and so that puts you on edge for
Speaker 2: threats of whatever type. The other thing is emotion. It's
Speaker 2: possible that what gets carried over from say, watching a movie,
Speaker 2: is a free floating emotion without a reference in the
Speaker 2: real world. So again you know that the events of
Speaker 2: the sad movie or the scary movie are not literally true,
Speaker 2: but they give you an emotion that lingers, and then
Speaker 2: that emotion, without a reference in your life, can just
Speaker 2: kind of get attached to whatever. This may happen even
Speaker 2: easier for children, because children may feel emotions even more intensely,
Speaker 2: and the act of pretending itself tends to result in
Speaker 2: heightened emotions for children.
Speaker 1: I don't want to complicate things too much by bringing
Speaker 1: up dreams, but I feel like this is maybe more
Speaker 1: pronounced for grown ups. In that situation where you wake
Speaker 1: up from a disturbing dream and you still feel disturbed,
Speaker 1: you know you can't help but carry that over into
Speaker 1: at least the first portion of your morning, even though
Speaker 1: you know that was a dream, and maybe even analysis
Speaker 1: of the facts of the dream are just ridiculous, but
Speaker 1: the feeling remains. And I think I have encountered that
Speaker 1: with films before as well, if they are particularly either
Speaker 1: I'm particularly sensitive, or the vibe is particularly strong in
Speaker 1: a given film, or some combination of the two. So yeah,
Speaker 1: taking those two into account, I think helps me better
Speaker 1: understand where a child may be coming from when they
Speaker 1: have this situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But then there's a third thing Ruffman brings up
Speaker 2: that I think is the So we have those similarities
Speaker 2: with kids on those first two things, the emotion and
Speaker 2: the UH and the availability or salience, But then there's
Speaker 2: a big difference, which is our background knowledge. Roufman points
Speaker 2: out that, simply put, kids know less than adults about
Speaker 2: how the world works and what is in it, So
Speaker 2: it is actually less unreasonable than it seems too adults
Speaker 2: for children to entertain implausible scenarios like there's a monster
Speaker 2: in my closet. By the time you're forty, you should
Speaker 2: be aware that this is actually not something that happens
Speaker 2: in reality. They're not monsters in closets. But when you're three,
Speaker 2: it's reasonable to consider this is a still live option,
Speaker 2: like you don't have enough experience to reasonably rule that out.
Speaker 1: By the time you're forty, though, like late thirties, still understandable.
Speaker 2: So this still does not necessarily mean that children have
Speaker 2: confused what happens in a pretend game with what happens
Speaker 2: in reality. So you know, a child might worry that
Speaker 2: there's an unseen monster in the closet, but would probably
Speaker 2: not worry that like you know, mommy playing the monster
Speaker 2: chase game. That means mom literally turned into a monster
Speaker 2: when she was chasing the kid around and roaring. You know,
Speaker 2: there can just be kind of a vague infection of
Speaker 2: ideas from one to the other, even if you don't
Speaker 2: confuse the pretend scenario for a literal reality. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's also worth caveating here though, that you know,
Speaker 1: even as adults, we can still even though we know
Speaker 1: think we know how the world works, it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: we really know how the world works at all levels.
Speaker 1: And we're also prone to latching onto best case scenarios
Speaker 1: and worst case scenarios as if those are the most
Speaker 1: most likely outcomes. So yeah, there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: room for error in all of this. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: understand the basic idea here. Yeah, the kids just know
Speaker 1: less about the world, and they're able to they're more
Speaker 1: susceptible to the contagion of those ideas.
Speaker 2: All right, From here, I want to skip over a
Speaker 2: few things in the paper and move on to talking
Speaker 2: about a couple of the mental capacities that the author
Speaker 2: of this paper mentioned as possibly being related to pretend
Speaker 2: play in childhood, and the three that the author explores
Speaker 2: are symbolic understanding, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning. As
Speaker 2: I said, we might save theory of mind more for
Speaker 2: part two, But applying to all three of these concepts,
Speaker 2: pretend play appears to have links to the development of
Speaker 2: these abilities, but there are a lot of questions about
Speaker 2: how strong these links are and how they work, Like
Speaker 2: should it be understood that pretend to play is causally
Speaker 2: necessary for learning any of them? Or is it merely
Speaker 2: fact facilitative, meaning making it easier or faster to learn them?
Speaker 2: Or could they be working in the opposite direction, like
Speaker 2: the nascent beginnings of these capacities are what makes pretend
Speaker 2: play possible, or could pretend play be what is called epiphenomenal,
Speaker 2: meaning an unnecessary byproduct of these developing capacities, Like it
Speaker 2: doesn't do anything itself, it just emerges because the brain
Speaker 2: can do these things. Weisberg notes that this really is
Speaker 2: difficult to study scientifically. It's hard to get really conclusive
Speaker 2: answers on a lot of these questions, especially because it
Speaker 2: is hard to build robust and ethical experiments on this,
Speaker 2: Like you can't really have control groups in which you
Speaker 2: force children to grow up without engaging and pretend play.
Speaker 2: That's not really ethical. So a lot of the ways
Speaker 2: we would have of studying. These questions are like indirect
Speaker 2: ways of looking at it and leave us with maybe
Speaker 2: helpful but still incomplete evidence. So the first thing to
Speaker 2: look at here is symbolic understanding. Pretend play is really
Speaker 2: interesting because it is symbolic in nature. And to come
Speaker 2: back to one example that shows this pretty easily. The
Speaker 2: usually the first acquired form of pretend to play in
Speaker 2: child development object substitution. So the stick is a sword,
Speaker 2: the remote control is a phone. This wash cloth is
Speaker 2: a warm blanket for the baby dinosaur. Things stand in
Speaker 2: for other things that they in a literal sense, are not,
Speaker 2: though they might be closer or further in you know,
Speaker 2: physical form to the thing they're supposed to represent. You know,
Speaker 2: pretending a baby doll is a baby is still a
Speaker 2: form of pretending, because even though a baby doll is
Speaker 2: made to be is to look like a baby, it
Speaker 2: resembles a baby, it is not literally a baby. So
Speaker 2: like it, you know, when you feed it, it doesn't
Speaker 2: actually eat, and so forth.
Speaker 1: But pretending a remote control is a phone, like that's
Speaker 1: that's rather straightforward, and actually, I mean when you're super young, like,
Speaker 1: what's the difference between all of these various gadgets that
Speaker 1: your parents have in their house, right, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: all just slightly different versions of the same thing.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, yeah, Despite the general lack of understanding about,
Speaker 2: you know, the intricacies of how a lot of devices
Speaker 2: work in real life. In pretend to play, I mean,
Speaker 2: a child can really learn to consistently, across time manipulate
Speaker 2: a symbolic object as if it were the thing it represented,
Speaker 2: having the properties, functions, and effects of the pretend object.
Speaker 2: So like, you know, the child might not really understand
Speaker 2: fully how a phone works, but they can keep treating
Speaker 2: the remote as a phone in place calls with it.
Speaker 2: They might even try to FaceTime, you know, the like
Speaker 2: they'll they will go through activities that they've seen adults
Speaker 2: do with the phone. So what Weisberg notes that some
Speaker 2: child development scholars dispute the extent to which pretend to
Speaker 2: play should be seen as actually symbolic. Now, there are
Speaker 2: a couple of different frameworks here, different ways of thinking
Speaker 2: about what pretending is in something like object substitution. Is
Speaker 2: it simply a behavior or is it actually a mentalistic
Speaker 2: process of representation in the brain. Is it a mental state? Now?
Speaker 2: Weisberg explains the behavior view like this quote. When pretending
Speaker 2: that a banana is a phone, one behaves as if
Speaker 2: the banana was a phone and performs the actions with
Speaker 2: the banana that would be appropriate if the banana was
Speaker 2: a phone. No mentalizing is necessary for the game to proceed,
Speaker 2: as the pretense is connected primarily to behaviors and not
Speaker 2: necessarily to mental states or intentions. So in this view,
Speaker 2: the child does not actually need to have separate concepts
Speaker 2: of banana and phone and mentally apply the attributes of
Speaker 2: the phone to the banana, understanding that they are in
Speaker 2: fact different. Instead, they're just treating the banana as if
Speaker 2: it were actually a phone. What is the support for
Speaker 2: this view, Well, Weisberg cites research where if you take
Speaker 2: four year olds and five year olds. Take these children
Speaker 2: and you show them a character hopping like a kangaroo,
Speaker 2: and then you tell the kids that the character who
Speaker 2: hops like a kangaroo does not know what a kangaroo is,
Speaker 2: and then you ask them is the hopping character pretending
Speaker 2: to be a kangaroo? The majority of four and five
Speaker 2: year olds will say yes. In their view, the hopping
Speaker 2: character is pretending to be a kangaroo, even if the
Speaker 2: character has never heard of a kangaroo and doesn't know
Speaker 2: what it is. Now. Actually, I think that's a really
Speaker 2: interesting finding that might seem kind of subtle, and I
Speaker 2: don't know whether it proves the pure behavior view of
Speaker 2: pretend play, but I think this is just kind of
Speaker 2: an interesting result. Nonetheless, I don't think adults would make
Speaker 2: the same judgment. I think if you asked adults, we
Speaker 2: would probably mostly say that you need to know what
Speaker 2: something is in order to pretend to be that thing.
Speaker 2: But for a lot of four and five year olds,
Speaker 2: know you only need to act like a thing to
Speaker 2: pretend to be it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for adults, I feel like the revelation that the
Speaker 1: individual acting like a kangaroo doesn't know what a kangaroo is, like,
Speaker 1: that's potentially horrifying. Yeah, right, that makes things a lot
Speaker 1: more concerning. Yeah, but they're just like, well, yeah, they're
Speaker 1: pretending to be a kangaroo. Of course, they're pretending to
Speaker 1: be a kangaro. It doesn't matter if they don't know
Speaker 1: what one is. They are pretending to be a kangaroo.
Speaker 2: But Weisberg argues that subsequent research on this question has
Speaker 2: made the initial result maybe a little more complicated, and
Speaker 2: it's possible that this doesn't really tell us what's happening
Speaker 2: when children pretend, but is instead addressing a second order
Speaker 2: related question of how children conceptualize what pretending is, which
Speaker 2: is an interesting question but a different one because like
Speaker 2: a child may not actually be able to fully explain
Speaker 2: their own mental states in pretending. They might be doing
Speaker 2: one thing when pretending, but when you ask a child
Speaker 2: what pretending is, they'll tell you something kind of different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's such an adult impulse too, to like, okay
Speaker 1: that then you were doing. Now I'm going to ruin
Speaker 1: it by asking you to explain it, you know, like
Speaker 1: they're just doing it. They're just engaging in the pretend play.
Speaker 2: Now. The other view, the mental symbolism view. This is
Speaker 2: the view that says children are indeed engaging in mental
Speaker 2: symbolism when they play pretend, and in this case, the
Speaker 2: game quote crucially requires understanding something about the mental states
Speaker 2: involved so that one is aware what is intended in
Speaker 2: the game. So under this view, it would be important
Speaker 2: to understand that you are intending to pretend to be
Speaker 2: a kangaroo in order to pretend to be a kangaroo.
Speaker 2: So in this view, like if a kid is playing
Speaker 2: the banana phone game, it is necessary that they understand
Speaker 2: and that all play partners understand that the banana is
Speaker 2: supposed to represent a phone now. As evidence supporting this view,
Speaker 2: Weisberg sites some other interesting experimental findings. One is experiments
Speaker 2: showing that kids in this preschool age can readily navigate
Speaker 2: a bunch of different pretend to play episodes with different partners,
Speaker 2: which depends on keeping track of what each different play
Speaker 2: partner knows about what the play props represent. So maybe
Speaker 2: Dad knows, but Mom does not know that this pile
Speaker 2: of crayons is actually spaghetti and my dinosaurs are eating it.
Speaker 2: Mom would need to be informed that the crayons are spaghetti. Now,
Speaker 2: how can you tell that children have this ability to
Speaker 2: navigate the different understandings like this? Children often get upset
Speaker 2: or protest when a play partner starts using a prop
Speaker 2: literally instead of in its symbolic identity. So like, if
Speaker 2: we're playing the crayons or spaghetti game and then I
Speaker 2: go pick up a spaghetti crayon and start drawing with it,
Speaker 2: the child is very likely to be like, no, that
Speaker 2: is spaghetti, not a crayon. If you encountered this.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, definitely in these more abstract forms, but
Speaker 1: also in the case of stuffed animals or stuffies, like
Speaker 1: what is the difference between a stuffed animal and a pillow?
Speaker 1: Try and use a beloved stuffed animal as a pillow,
Speaker 1: and the child will let you know.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, classic, that's a great one. But so generally,
Speaker 2: the children in this kind of example only protest like
Speaker 2: this if the play partner should be expected to know
Speaker 2: about the substitution, So like if the person they're playing
Speaker 2: with was present when the pretense began, So that's kind
Speaker 2: of interesting. You know, the child will have more patience
Speaker 2: for somebody who just entered the picture and doesn't understand
Speaker 2: that the crayons are spaghetti. More evidence that pretend to
Speaker 2: play is mentally symbolic and not just behavioral. Some actions
Speaker 2: observed and pretend to play only make sense if there
Speaker 2: is a symbolic representation, and do not make sense if
Speaker 2: the child were simply behaving as if the object really
Speaker 2: was the substitution object. Here's an example. You've got a
Speaker 2: little Lego block and you decide it's a car, and
Speaker 2: you are pushing the Lego block around and saying vroom
Speaker 2: vroom and making horn honking sounds. Children do stuff like
Speaker 2: this all the time. Is that what a child does
Speaker 2: in relation to a real car push it around and
Speaker 2: say vroom vroom.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: In a real car, the child like gets inside and
Speaker 2: rides and maybe looks out the window. There is no
Speaker 2: behavior to enact in relation to a real car that
Speaker 2: is similar to pushing a tiny object around on the
Speaker 2: ground and making vrooming sounds and horn honking sounds with
Speaker 2: your mouth. This really only makes sense if the child
Speaker 2: understands that the block is not a car but represents
Speaker 2: a car. So in the end, Weisberg argues that the
Speaker 2: symbolic view of pretense is better supported by the evidence. Now,
Speaker 2: what does this mean for the broader idea of symbolic
Speaker 2: understanding and child development. Again, it's hard to prove this
Speaker 2: kind of thing conclusively, but a lot of researchers have
Speaker 2: suggested that there's a link between pretend play and symbolic thinking,
Speaker 2: and it means that pretend play could be important for
Speaker 2: the development of the most significant form of symbolic thinking
Speaker 2: in human culture, which is language. Language is inherently symbolic
Speaker 2: because a word is not the thing itself, It only
Speaker 2: represents the thing, so it may be that pretend play
Speaker 2: gives children a chance to practice symbolic thinking, which in
Speaker 2: turn helps accelerate their acquisition of language in early childhood.
Speaker 2: Some researchers apparently think this, but again it's hard to
Speaker 2: disentangle the variables and see which direction if any of
Speaker 2: the causal relationship goes. One thing is pretty clear is
Speaker 2: that pretending is not necessary for language acquisition, but it
Speaker 2: may simply make it easier and faster. Weisberg briefly offers
Speaker 2: another interesting idea. This is almost just an aside and
Speaker 2: a sentence, but it really started working around in my brain.
Speaker 2: Wesberg writes, quote play may provide an especially facilitative environment
Speaker 2: for children to experiment with new syntactic constructions. If I
Speaker 2: understand that right, I think this means that because pretending
Speaker 2: during play allows you to generate infinitely variable scenarios without
Speaker 2: ever having to leave your home or your normal routines,
Speaker 2: it encourages novel constructions of language based thought. So, in
Speaker 2: other words, a child may literally do almost the same
Speaker 2: thing in the same place most days, but because playing
Speaker 2: pretend can create weird, novel situations with very little effort
Speaker 2: or risk, you will be required to think and speak
Speaker 2: new sentences, which is important as you get better at
Speaker 2: speaking and practice your language skills, you know, under what
Speaker 2: other I was just thinking about, like what my daughter's
Speaker 2: doing in the past few days. She's like, she is
Speaker 2: making new weird sentences all the time, Like you know,
Speaker 2: little gholies, get on boat and go on water and
Speaker 2: see red buoye and go to Nana's house.
Speaker 1: Little goolies, where did she pick up? Has she seen
Speaker 1: the movie?
Speaker 2: No, she's got she's got some little some little weird,
Speaker 2: little weird guys who are ugulies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, that makes sense, but yeah, I mean this
Speaker 1: is again this touches on one of the great things
Speaker 1: about being around children is that they are just such
Speaker 1: a font of wild creativity that grown ups typically just
Speaker 1: don't have as ready access to. Like I'm sure this
Speaker 1: is a story I've told on the show before, but
Speaker 1: this was before I became a parent. I went to
Speaker 1: an improv show. It was like a local improv group,
Speaker 1: and they were doing a kid's puppet show, but it
Speaker 1: was entirely improv and they would ask the children to
Speaker 1: give them ideas to then act out. And so even
Speaker 1: like seasoned improv group, like they were really you know,
Speaker 1: they were really rolling with some of these ideas, Like
Speaker 1: I distinctly remember one little girl saying Batman the girl
Speaker 1: as being one of the concepts. Anyway, that's just one example. Obviously,
Speaker 1: anyone who's been around children for any length of time
Speaker 1: can think of a hundred more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they get they get weird. Yeah, did I already mention?
Speaker 2: Mine is also right now obsessed with changing diapers on dinosaurs.
Speaker 2: On dinosaurs, the dinosaurs have diapers, and they often have
Speaker 2: poop needs to be changed.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, that's that's just sensible.
Speaker 2: Oh but quickly before we move off of the symbolic
Speaker 2: understanding thing, h Weisberg, the language is clearly the most
Speaker 2: important type of symbolic skills in human culture. Language is
Speaker 2: not the only symbolic skill practiced through pretend to play.
Speaker 2: Another one the author mentions is quote reasoning with maps
Speaker 2: and scale models. That's the type of symbolic representation. You
Speaker 2: can think of a play space on the floor as
Speaker 2: really being much like a map, a scale representation of
Speaker 2: a topography or landscape in miniature on which you can
Speaker 2: sort of plot routes and act things out. And this
Speaker 2: is a big part of adult reasoning about how to
Speaker 2: get around places.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes sense since you consider
Speaker 1: that often a child's room contains multiple scale models, be
Speaker 1: they lego kits that have been assembled or you know,
Speaker 1: or stuffies that are of vehicles. I mean there are
Speaker 1: a million different variations of this obviously, but by having
Speaker 1: those objects in a space, it kind of turns that
Speaker 1: space into a kind of map or a miniaturized world.
Speaker 2: Totally. Okay, one more thing before we wrap up Part one.
Speaker 2: Here is Weisberg's exploration of the link between pretend play
Speaker 2: and counter factual reasoning. So, counterfact ctual reasoning is reasoning
Speaker 2: based on a premise that you do not accept as
Speaker 2: current reality. So here's one. If cheetos were blue instead
Speaker 2: of orange, what color would your fingertips become after eating them?
Speaker 2: You know that cheetos are not actually blue, but you
Speaker 2: can easily answer this question because you can reason counterfactually. Right, blue? Right?
Speaker 2: Got it on the record, Yes, okay, So you know,
Speaker 2: as a comparison, imagine this banana war a phone. How
Speaker 2: would you use it? It's easy to see playing pretend
Speaker 2: as really almost exactly the same thing as counterfactual reasoning.
Speaker 2: You start with a premise that is not literal. It
Speaker 2: is different than how you think the world actually is,
Speaker 2: and then you act it out. You follow from there.
Speaker 2: But interestingly, studies have found that children in the so
Speaker 2: called high season of pretend to play, you know, this
Speaker 2: period of like three to five years old, where they're
Speaker 2: playing pretend all the time. Kids in this age range
Speaker 2: show a lot of difficulty with counterfactual reasoning and experiments.
Speaker 2: Some examples cited by Weisberg here. One is like an
Speaker 2: experiment where a kid watches a toy mouse go down
Speaker 2: a little forked slide and then answers questions about it.
Speaker 2: So you can imagine, one condition is the child watches
Speaker 2: the mouse go down the fork in one direction, and
Speaker 2: then the experimenter asks, if the mouse goes down the
Speaker 2: opposite side of the fork next time, where will it
Speaker 2: end up. Kids do okay with this question. It's a
Speaker 2: hypothetical question about a future event, and they've already seen
Speaker 2: how the slide works in principle, so they do okay. However,
Speaker 2: they have a lot more difficulty with almost exactly the
Speaker 2: same question, but just if it's phrased as a counterfactual instead,
Speaker 2: So you show them the mouse going down one side
Speaker 2: of the fork, and then you ask them if the
Speaker 2: mouse had gone down the other way of the fork instead,
Speaker 2: where would it have ended up. Apparently kids really struggle
Speaker 2: with this. Children at this age also really struggle with
Speaker 2: counterfactual syllogisms, like the like the blue Cheetos thing reasoning
Speaker 2: based on a counterfactual premise, so you can say something like,
Speaker 2: imagine a world where cats bark instead of me owing.
Speaker 2: In this world, Fluffy is a cat. Does Fluffy bark
Speaker 2: or meow? Preschoolers struggle with this as well. They seem
Speaker 2: to have a hard time ignoring their legitimate knowledge about
Speaker 2: the real world, which is that cats meow, they do
Speaker 2: not bark, And so the kids want to say Fluffy
Speaker 2: meows because they know that cats meow.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can see the difficulty because this is
Speaker 1: kind of like a bedrock understanding of reality, you know,
Speaker 1: And if you snatch that away and flip it around, yeah,
Speaker 1: it takes a minute to recalibrate to that.
Speaker 2: So it's very interesting that counterfactual reasoning and playing pretend
Speaker 2: seem to us to be nearly the same thing. They're
Speaker 2: almost exactly the same thing. Yet preschoolers tend to excel
Speaker 2: at one and struggle with the other. Genuine skill at
Speaker 2: counterfactual reasoning only seems to come online later with some
Speaker 2: effort and training. So one idea offered in this paper
Speaker 2: is the idea of implicit versus explicit understanding. So when
Speaker 2: pretending children engage an implicit or intuitive sense of counterfactual reasoning,
Speaker 2: that's acted out through play in the body. But maybe
Speaker 2: what they struggle with is understanding counterfactual reasoning purely in words,
Speaker 2: which is why they're having trouble with syllogisms. That's one possibility,
Speaker 2: it's the explicit versus implicit. But also interesting thing is
Speaker 2: that some experiments have shown that you can improve preschooler's
Speaker 2: performance on counterfactual syllogisms simply by explaining the counterfactual element
Speaker 2: as pretend play. So you can imagine asking, maybe a
Speaker 2: kid struggles with the you know the like you know,
Speaker 2: cats bark in this world? What is Fluffy the cat say? Instead,
Speaker 2: you could say, fluffy the cat is pretending to be
Speaker 2: a dog. When he is pretending to be a dog,
Speaker 2: does he bark or meow? So maybe this kind of
Speaker 2: thing can can kind of get through more more on
Speaker 2: the implicit wavelength. But anyway, some Researchers have argued that
Speaker 2: the adaptive function of pretend to play is exactly this
Speaker 2: about counterfactual reasoning. It's to prepare children for serious counterfactual
Speaker 2: reasoning later in life. And I want to emphasize that
Speaker 2: counterfactual reasoning is not just like high flutint philosophical thought
Speaker 2: experiments or you know, it's not just on that level.
Speaker 2: I mean, we engage in counterfactual reasoning every single day.
Speaker 2: One function of counterfactual reasoning that is very useful is
Speaker 2: to learn not only from mistakes made, but from mistakes
Speaker 2: almost made, or from the mistakes of others. So you
Speaker 2: can think, you can like go through an experience and
Speaker 2: then think, wow, if I had done it this other way,
Speaker 2: that could have gone really bad, and you can learn
Speaker 2: from that even though you didn't actually have that experience.
Speaker 2: You just know enough to know that you shouldn't have
Speaker 2: done that, and you won't do that in the future.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 2: Like who knows, maybe you know, you take the boat
Speaker 2: ride across the river even though you were thinking about swimming,
Speaker 2: and halfway across you see some crocodiles and you remember, like, oh,
Speaker 2: I can reason if I had swam instead of riding
Speaker 2: the boat. That would have been bad.
Speaker 1: It reminds see there's a line in I Figure which
Speaker 1: Cormick McCarthy book, but there's a character pondering all the
Speaker 1: worse luck, their bad luck might have saved them from.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah yeah. Now Again, what's less clear is to
Speaker 2: what extent there is any kind of direct training effects.
Speaker 2: It seems plausible that pretend to play really does train
Speaker 2: the brain for counterfactual reasoning, But we don't know. But
Speaker 2: interesting thing to study and cert plausible based on what
Speaker 2: we do know. Now, I think we're starting to run
Speaker 2: a little long, so this might be the place that
Speaker 2: we have to cut part one here. But obviously there's
Speaker 2: going to be a lot more to say about Pretend
Speaker 2: to Play in subsequent episodes. At least one more, we
Speaker 2: can promise you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, I do have a few follow up questions, so
Speaker 1: before we close out, First of all, where do you
Speaker 1: stand on air guitar? You being a person who actually
Speaker 1: plays a guitar, do you, as a grown up engage
Speaker 1: in air guitar? Do you find yourself playing the air
Speaker 1: guitar whilst listening to music for at least moments of
Speaker 1: not extended periods.
Speaker 2: I don't know what this says about me, but I
Speaker 2: really know do not play air guitar at all. This
Speaker 2: no judgment against it. I'm fully supportive of air guitar behaviors,
Speaker 2: but I don't find myself doing it when I listen
Speaker 2: to music. I just I dance, but air guitar is
Speaker 2: not part of the repertoire.
Speaker 1: How about air drums?
Speaker 2: Oh, I do more of that. Interesting. I don't actually
Speaker 2: play the drums, but I'm more likely to act out
Speaker 2: playing drums without real drums there.
Speaker 1: Yeah huh. Interesting, Like if in the air tonight place,
Speaker 1: you're definitely going to go do the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all the fills, the fills in a gottadavida,
Speaker 2: the drum solo. I cannot listen to that drum solo
Speaker 2: without acting it out.
Speaker 1: I will catch myself doing air guitar, but then I
Speaker 1: get very self conscious because I'm like, I don't know
Speaker 1: how to play the guitar. What am I doing? I'm
Speaker 1: just very roughly mimicking things that I've seen before. And
Speaker 1: then I put my hands in my pockets.
Speaker 2: Don't let it hold you back now.
Speaker 1: And then my other follow up question a pair of questions,
Speaker 1: really or observations involve again the banana as a telephone.
Speaker 1: First of all, are kids still doing this? Because we
Speaker 1: should point out that telephones don't really look like bananas anymore,
Speaker 1: like telephone receivers used to have more of a banana
Speaker 1: shape to them. More and more, I feel like kids
Speaker 1: are not exposed to those sorts of telephones. They're seeing
Speaker 1: smartphones that look more like TV remote controls.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. Well, well, you know in this in the paper,
Speaker 2: it was the banana as phone that was often cited.
Speaker 2: But I was using the example of the remotest phone
Speaker 2: because that is what happens in our house.
Speaker 1: Here's the other thing that comes to mind. The bananas
Speaker 1: phone definitely kills though, Like I feel like this is
Speaker 1: something that's definitely going to elicit laughter from grown ups.
Speaker 1: If a grown up does it, and if a kid
Speaker 1: does it, this is also going to get a lot
Speaker 1: of laughs out of mom and dad. I wonder to
Speaker 1: what extent that is factored into anything.
Speaker 2: Pretend play is funnier when the reach is farther and
Speaker 2: when the literal object is food.
Speaker 1: Yes, because the food the food technology gap is greater, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it you know, to get you were getting into
Speaker 1: the question of like, okay, how would this work if
Speaker 1: it were a phone? Like? That question is more ridiculous
Speaker 1: with the banana. How would the banana possibly function as
Speaker 1: a like fully grown telecommunication device? You know we can?
Speaker 2: So how do I put this on speaker?
Speaker 1: Yeah? All right, that's all I got. Those are the
Speaker 1: only follow up question.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, well, folks, we're gonna have to cut
Speaker 2: part one there, but we will be back with more
Speaker 2: about pretend to play on Thursday.
Speaker 1: That's right, Bring your imaginary friend and we'll have a
Speaker 1: good old time, all right. In the meantime, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna remind you stuff to blow your mind. Primarily a
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Speaker 1: the core episode of publication.
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Speaker 1: us at STBYM podcast.
Speaker 2: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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