Bretherton, I. (1986).
Representing the social world in symbolic play: Reality and fantasy.
In Gottfried, A. W. & Brown, C. C. (Eds.)
Play interactions: The contribution of play materials and parental involvement to children's development.
Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Piaget asserted that play does not contribute to cognitive development but plays a role in affective development (very influenced by psychoanalytic theories). Piaget believed that cognitive operations needed to be in place for event representations to be formed and stored. However, recent research suggests that event representation is the foundation for Piagetian cognitive development, including classification and other operations.

Mandler (1983) states that event representations, formed through experience, are the foundation for symbolic activity and representations of causal, temporal and spatial relations between agents, actions, recepients, and objects.

Pretense is a form of event representation and play with these fundamentally social representations results in cognitive development at two levels: in and out of the play frame.

Developmental trajectories:

Roles =

• self as agent
• imitate another person's behavior
• persons and replicas as recipients of actions
• parallel roles (self as agent/other as recepient)
• replica as active recipient
• replica as agent
• assume a role
• replica as active partner
• simple joint role play
• replica interaction with self as narrator
• joint play with interacting roles

Actions =

• single actions (existential pretense)
• action sequences
• ordered action sequences (meaningfully related)
• episode combinations

Objects =

• realistic
• substitutions
• miming

Metacommunication becoming perfected by age 4 and 5. At this time, the event representation is present both in and out of the play frame. Does this ability correlate with WM development?

In-frame switches can occur with cues such as questions, underscoring of statements, storytelling (which occurs in the past tense). Implicit pretend proposals are seen in which no attention is drawn to being in the pretend frame but to the contents of play. Formal pretend statements (e.g., let's pretend that...) are explicit pretend proposals. With mastery of play, movement in and out of the play frame is blurred and children can be in both at once. Pretend and real are kept distinct but are also tangled. Genuine emotions are present in play, these are not really detached.

Event schemas and memories are the raw materials of play but play is not a straightforward reproduction of events. The essence of make-believe is transformation.

2 yrs. = pretend "as if"

older preschool = can incorporate fantasy themes and actions into play