Edited by Robert W. Mitchell Eastern Kentucky University Cambridge University Press 2002 FROM THE BACK COVER It is well known that children's activities are full of pretending and imagination, but it is less appreciated that animals can also show similar activities. This is the first book to focus on comparing and contrasting children's and animals' pretenses and imaginative activities. In this book, overviews of recent research present conflicting interpretations of children's understanding of the psychology of pretense, and describe sociocultural factors that influence children's pretenses. Studies of nonhuman primates provide examples of their pretenses and other simulative activities, explore their representational and imaginative capacities and compare their skills with children's. Although the psychological requirements for pretending are controversial, evidence presented in this volume suggests that great apes and even monkeys may share capacities for imagination with children, and that children's early pretenses may be less psychological than they appear. Robert W. Mitchell is Professor of Psychology at Eastern Kentucky University. He is currently interested in exploring the significance of kinesthetic-visual matching in human and animal behavior and psychological understanding, and is writing a history of scientific attitudes toward using anthropomorphism to understand animals. Professor Mitchell's previous books include Self-awareness in animals and humans (1994, ISBN 0521441080), edited with S. T. Parker and M. L. Boccia, and The mentalities of gorillas and orangutans (1999, ISBN 0521580277), edited with S. T. Parker and H. L. Miles. CONTENTS List of contributors x Foreword by Sue Taylor Parker xiv Preface and acknowledgments xvii I. Historical, developmental, and comparative overviews: 1. Imaginative animals, pretending children 3 Robert W. Mitchell 2. A history of pretense in animals and children 23 Robert W. Mitchell 3. Pretending as representation: a developmental and comparative view 43 Lorraine McCune and Joanne Agayoff II. Pretense and imagination in children: 4. Language in pretense during the second year: what it can tell us about "pretending" in pretense and the "know-how" about the mind 59 Edy Veneziano 5. A longitudinal and cross-sectional study of the emergence of the symbolic function in children between 15 and 19 months of age: pretend play, object permanence understanding, and self-recognition 73 Pierre-Marie Baudonniere, Sylvie Margules, Soumeya Belkhenchir, Gwennaelle Carn, Florence Pepe, and Veronique Warkentin 6. Caregiver-child social pretend play: what transpires? 91 Robert D. Kavanaugh 7. Just through the looking glass: children's understanding of pretense 102 Angeline Lillard 8. Young children's understanding of pretense and other fictional mental states 115 Jacqueline D. Woolley 9. Pretend play, metarepresentation and theory of mind 129 Peter K. Smith 10. Replica toys, stories, and a functional theory of mind 142 Greta G. Fein, Lynn D. Darling, and Lois A. Groth 11. Young children's animal-role pretend play 154 Olin Eugene Myers, Jr. 12. Imaginary companions and elaborate fantasy in childhood: discontinuity with nonhuman animals 167 Marjorie Taylor and Stephanie M. Carlson III. In Pretense and imagination in primates: 13. Pretending in monkeys 183 Anne Zeller 14. Pretending primates: play and simulation in the evolution of primate societies 196 Peter C. Reynolds 15. Representational capacities for pretense with scale models and photographs in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) 210 Sarah T. Boysen and Valerie A. Kuhlmeier 16. Pretending in free-ranging rehabilitant orangutans 229 Anne E. Russon 17. Seeing with the mind's eye: eye-covering play in orangutans and Japanese macaques 241 Anne E. Russon, Paul L. Vasey, and Carole Gauthier 18. Possible precursors of pretend play in nonpretend actions of captive gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) 255 Juan Carlos Gomez and Beatriz Martin-Andrade 19. Pretending culture: social and cognitive features of pretense in apes and humans 269 Warren P. Roberts and Mark A. Krause 20. Empathy in a bonobo 280 Ellen J. Ingmanson 21. Pretend play in a signing gorilla 285 Marilyn L. Matevia, Francine G.P. Patternson, and William A. Hillix IV. Prospects: 22. Exploring pretense in animals and children 307 robert W. Mitchell References 317 Author Index 353 Subject Index 362 FOREWORD by Sue Taylor Parker The collection of articles herein focuses on the mysterious liminal region that lies between pre-symbolic and symbolic abilities. The transition between the two remains the least charted area, most intriguing of all developmental transformation in human childhood, and the least understood of all transformations in hominoid evolution. The mystery is deepened by disagreements over terminology. Simulation, imitation, pretense, symbolic play, representation, meta-representation, theory of mind, intentionality, and imagination, the very definition of these terms is contested territory. Authors of articles in this volume do not simplify the task because many of them disagree on these matters. Rather, their articles provide readers with a fascinating array of perspectives on these and related concepts. They also provide comparative data on a rich array of great ape species: humans, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, plus some macaque monkeys. Following in the wake of his earlier work on deception, self-awareness, and anthropomorphism, Robert Mitchell's new collection carries us further into contested twilight zones between infancy and childhood, and between other great ape and human minds. The juxtaposition between animals and children in the tide is more than accidental since many of the same frameworks have been used to study and compare children of our species with those of our closest living relatives, the nonhuman great apes, an approach that has come to be known as comparative developmental evolutionary psychology (Parker, 1990). One of the key debates in this volume, for example, revolves around Bateson's (1956) idea that the play face in monkeys constitutes metacommunicative, intentional deployment of gestures to convey such messages as "this is only play" or whether it is simply an evolved communicative display that directly reflects the animals motivational state. In other words, authors differ over whether or not "metacommunication" and perhaps presence exists in monkeys. At one extreme, Reynolds argues that "evolutionary changes in primate social organization presuppose the cognitive functions of presence and simulation." At the other extreme Gomez and Martin-Andrade argue that, even in gorillas, apparent examples of pretend play can better be explained by such precursors of true pretense as the ability to decontexualize and mentally represent actions. Similar differences exist among human developmental psychologists regarding the emergence of presence and symbolism. Many draw heavily on Piaget's stages of developmental imitation and pretend play. Some, like Leslie (1988), argue that the earliest forms of pretend play with objects representing other objects entails meta-representation whereas others such as Perner (1991) argue for intermediate stages, a position taken by Veneziano and Fein et al. in this volume. Before exploring all this, readers will find Mitchell's introductory chapter provides a useful roadmap to these and other contrasts in viewpoint of various contributors. Likewise, his chapter on the history of ideas about pretense in animals and humans provides a much-needed perspective on the incredible persistence of many of these issues. Finally, Mitchell's concluding chapter and that of Roberts and Krause, explicitly address implications of comparative studies of pretense for understanding the evolution of human culture and cognition. Given the developmental and evolutionary proximity between pretense and early language, perhaps it is inevitable that interest in the developmental and evolutionary emergence of language lurks behind much of the work on pretense. Piaget (1945/1962) and others have long argued for the common origins of symbolic play, language, and drawing. In recent years, developmental psychologists have moved in two opposing directions in their modeling of language acquisition. On the one hand, Pinker (1994) and other neo-Chompskians have emphasized the early, virtually imperturbable unfolding of innate grammar. On the other hand, Nelson and other constructivists have emphasized the prolonged and contingent course of language acquisition: "The child does not immediately make a leap from prelinguistic to linguistic, or from sensorimotor to representational, or any of the other stages that have been proposed as explanations of developments between 1 and 3 years of age. The transition is long and composed of a complexity of developments in different parts of the social-linguistic-cognitive system" (Nelson, 1996, p. l20). These two positions, in turn, project onto two different scenarios for the pace of language evolution. According to the first, language evolved recently and rapidly. According to the second, symbolic abilities began to evolve early in hominid evolution, indeed in ape evolution, but became fully linguistic only recently. Contributors to this volume generally fall more on the constructivist side. Those who enjoy contending hypotheses and a rich pallet of color and flavor in their comparative studies, will surely find a feast within! Choose your partner and let the dance begin again! WHERE TO ORDER Cambridge University Press 40 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011-4211, USA Phone: 1-800-872-7423 Fax: 914-937-4712 Web site: http://www.cambridge.org Price: $80.00(Hardbound) ISBN: 0-521-77030-0
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