Abstract
This research investigates children's understanding of the fantasy-reality distinction. Expt 1 addressed the influence of cognitive availability on children's beliefs about pretend entities by comparing 4- to 7-year-old children's responses to prompted pretence or non-pretence tasks with both their unprompted behaviour and their verbal justifications. The results suggest that there are individual and developmental differences in children's susceptibility to fantasy-reality confusion. Expt 2 was designed to further investigate children's unprompted behaviours by adding a second (pre-task) period when the children were observed in the experimenter's absence. In this study, the developmental differences and the relationship between children's prompted and unprompted behaviours were no longer obtained, suggesting that children's unprompted behaviours may be differently motivated depending on preceding events. The pattern of results across the two experiments suggests an interaction between individual and developmental differences in the effects of increased cognitive availability on children's beliefs about the fantasy-reality distinction.
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