PRESCHOOLERS ATTRIBUTIONS OF MENTAL STATES IN PRETENSE

When young children appear to recognize that someone else is engaging in make-believe play, do they infer what the pretender is thinking? Ar e they aware that the pretender is thinking about a pretend scenario y et knows what the real situation is? Preschoolers ages 3-5 (N = 45) vi ewed scenes from the Barney & Friends television series depicting eith er make-believe or realistic actions. Children were questioned concern ing the presence of pretense and the thoughts and beliefs of the TV ch aracters. The children were also presented with false belief and appea rance/reality theory of mind tasks. Children who identified when TV ch aracters were engaging in pretend play did not necessarily infer the p retenders' thoughts and beliefs. Inferring pretenders' thoughts was re lated to performance on false belief and appearance/reality tasks, but simply recognizing pretense was not. These data support the view that children initially learn to recognize pretense from contextual cues a nd are able to infer pretenders' beliefs only with further development of metarepresentational ability.