Children's understanding of the animacy constraint on pretense

There is controversy over how well children understand pretense. One possib ility is that for young children, pretense is not a mental state but is mer ely an external manifestation. If so, young children would think inanimates can pretend, because inanimates can be like other entities. Four experimen ts tested this. When shown pictured items, 4-year-olds understood that only animates pretend, but 3-year-olds sometimes claimed that inanimates preten d. However, when shown the actual items, even 4-year-olds sometimes claimed that inanimates pretend. This was particularly the case when adults explic itly pointed out that the objects looked or acted like something else. Chil dren's errors were fairly specific to pretense in that they did not tend to attribute thinking to inanimates.