Distinguishing Imagination from Reality

Children engage with their imaginative faculties in a variety of ways as they grow and develop. Th ey play simple pretend games starting at about the age of two (Fein, 1981; Nicolich, 1977; Singer & Singer, 1990), which are then elaborated into longer pretend sequences and sometimes into ongoing relationships with imaginary companions (Taylor, 1999) and paracosms (see chapter 27). Children also listen to and make up fi ctional stories throughout the early preschool years and beyond (Applebee, 1978; Appleyard, 1990; Engel, 1995), and they engage in counterfactual reasoning both implicitly (e.g., in causal learning; see Gopnik & Schulz, 2007) and explicitly (e.g., German & Nichols, 2003; Leevers & Harris, 2000; Sobel, 2004). Th ese studies and others suggest that children are quite competent at navigating between imagination and reality. However, it would be imprudent to credit children with a true understanding of these imaginative activities without fi rst considering how Abstract