Pretend play as a human characteristic

Fully developed pretend play, including role play and sociodramatic play, seems universal in all human societies and uniquely human, with only rudimentary pretence shown by some apes (Schwartzmann, 1978; Slaughter & Dombrowski, 1989; Smith, 1996). Cross-cultural variations exist in amount and type of pretence (Smilansky, 1968; Roopnarine, Johnson & Hooper, 1994), which appears dependent upon children's physical and cultural context. For example, among hunter-gatherers, children in mixed-age peer groups used sticks and pebbles to represent village huts and herding cows (Konner, 1976; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989), and in the Marquesas Islands of Polynesia, children made mud bananas (Martini, 1994). Such symbolic object-use comprised half of the “fantasy play” episodes of the Marquesan children; the other half involved more complex scripts and roles, such as “‘ship’ play, ‘fishing,’ ‘hunting,’ and ‘preparing feasts’” (Martini, 1994, p. 84). These episodes “follow the same fantasy scripts from one performance to the next,” and often involve some imitation of adult actions.

The ubiquitousness of pretend play in human children suggests biological processes at work (Slaughter & Dombrowski, 1989; Harris, 1994), and raises the question of its biological function.