Studies in Pretense Play and the Conservation of Quantity

Abstract

In recent years psychologists and educators have shown a renewed interest in the nature of child play and have raised interesting questions about its possible significance for cognitive development. One of the early pioneering studies, published by the Israeli investigator Sara Smilansky (1968), stressed the importance of pretense or make-believe play in a social setting. Smilansky suggested that a number of important cognitive and social skills are being exercised when preschool children engage in sociodramatic play and that these skills are essential for success during the elementary school years. When children engage in role-play they must, of necessity, take the perspective of their own assumed role and that of the play partner, and coordinate their actions accordingly. Thus several students of role-play, stressing that role-taking implies perspective-taking skills, have attempted to establish the degree of corelation between role-play and perceptual, cognitive, and affective perspective-taking tasks (Feffer & Gourevich, 1960; Selman, 1971; Turnure, 1975). The results of these studies seem to lend some support to the notion that role-playing employs cognitive skills, but the data are not altogether consistent. Perhaps this ought not to be surprising to us, since the term “perspective-taking” probably refers to diverse rather than to unitary social and cognitive skills.