ABSTRACT
Several of the major accounts of how children develop an understanding of the mind assign some sort of special role to pretence. For example, in Harris’s simulation account (1991; this volume), the child learns about other people’s mental states by using a capacity that is also exercised in pretend play: The capacity to simulate nonexistent situations. In Leslie’s (1987; 1988) computational model, the same cognitive architecture that is used in pretend play is also used in understanding others’ mental states. Perner, Baker, and Hutton (this volume) maintain that pretence and belief understanding arise from a single concept, which they term “prelief”. Others (Flavell, 1988; Fodor, 1992; Forguson & Gopnik, 1988) have written that children have an early understanding of mental representation in the domain of pretence. (Flavell has since retracted this claim.)
