Development Of Young Children's Recognition Of Pretending And Inference Of Pretendere's Mental State Influenced By Knowledge State

Recently, researchers have shown great interest in young children's cognition development of pretense. A key question of related researches is that whether children's understanding of pretense involves mental representation. Researchers such as Lillard found that young children understand pretense as simply acting in a way that discrepant from reality, rather than it involves mental component. Others propose that young children has already understood pretense as mental state.Our studies try to test 3-6 year old children's understanding of the role of knowledge state in pretense. We present a pretending action and a copy action and ask children to recognize them according to others' knowledge state. The task story is presented by pictures to avoid the influence of the way of presenting, and pretender's mental representation is explicated by thought bubbles which reflect the contents someone is thinking about. The results show that: (1) Children's understanding of pretender's mental...