Pretense as an Adaptation
2000 June 06
- Frame in the literature concerning play as an adaptation for learning/function
of play to rehearse skills and for innovation = Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner,
Fagan, Blurton Jones, Sutton-Smith, Pellegrini, ethologists.
- Differentiate pretense from play = e.g., sensorimotor play as practice coordinating
motor movements but it is not pretense. Pretense, specifically, is an adaptation
for learning that has different characteristics from play as an adaptation.
Ethologists did not view pretense as symbolic mapping in animals, which creates
a discontinuity between animal and human play. Present chase play as nonrepresentational
pretense and sociocultural play as representational pretense.
- Present adaptationist criteria
- Explain how pretense functions as a learning strategy = predator detection
and evasion schema (a.k.a. template), rerouting, possibility space, imaginative
immersion, structural learning, etc.
- Present how our theory of pretense fits the adaptationist criteria.
- Discussion = connect to sociocultural pretense and mark this as an area
of future study.
