Pretend play as abstraction: Implications for early development and beyond.

Publisher: Pergamon Press Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 7806090 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1873-7528 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 01497634 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Neurosci Biobehav Rev Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: New York Ny : Pergamon Press
Original Publication: Fayetteville, N. Y., ANKHO International Inc.

Child Development*/physiology ; Play and Playthings*; Humans ; Cognition ; Creativity ; Social Behavior

Humans are the only species that engages in sustained, complex pretend play. As pretend play is practically ubiquitous across cultures, it might support or afford a context for developmental advances during the juvenile period that have implications for functioning in adulthood. Early in development, learning to separate our thoughts from reality is practiced in pretend play and is associated with changes not just in cognition, but in emotional and social domains as well. Specifically, pretend play affords opportunities to engage in abstractions that could support abilities such as perspective-taking, emotion recognition and regulation, and cooperation and negotiation in childhood. In turn, the abstraction skills promoted by early pretend play might underlie creativity, innovation, and our capacity to feel empathy and moral obligation to others in later childhood and adulthood. In fact, because pretend play affords sharing our abstractions with others, it might be an early context for behaviors that ultimately promote the shared abstractions of human culture itself.
Competing Interests: Declarations of interest None.
(Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Keywords: Abstraction; Child development; Childhood; Cognition; Emotion; Imaginative play; Pretend play; Social relationships

Date Created: 20230214 Date Completed: 20230320 Latest Revision: 20230413

20240513

10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105090

36787871