IMAGINATIVE MINDS
An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Additional Resources

The development of imagination in children

(See also the section on Atypical imagination and brain mechanisms for references on imagination deficits in autism spectrum disorders)

• Further reading

It is in childhood that imagination is perhaps at its most active and pervasive. Children take delight in pretence and role-playing from an early age. Typically infants display simple forms of pretence, such as using one object to represent another, from as early as 12 months. More elaborate forms of pretence unfold thereafter, in which isolated pretend acts become incorporated into complex sequences (such as making a cup of tea), and children adopt pretend roles (such as Batman or ‘mothers and fathers’) in extended scenarios involving social interaction with their peers. Children also engage enthusiastically with stories about fairies or magic. Many believe in fantasy characters such as Father Christmas, or in fairies and their magical powers. Some invent their own imaginary companions or imaginary worlds. Language develops alongside the child’s imaginative capacities and no doubt plays a complex and crucial role in supporting and promoting them. For instance, it offers a vehicle both for expressing pretence and elaborating its possibilities with others. By the same token (Harris 2000) argues that in keeping track of events in extended pretend scenarios, children are acquiring the basis for making sense of narrative sequence in stories and in conversations about past events.

Imagination, broadly conceived as the capacity to entertain ideas that are different from current reality, is fundamental to many aspects of the child’s unfolding thought processes. Children between the ages of 2 and 3 begin to think ‘counterfactually’, that is, in terms of ‘what if . . .?’ or ‘supposing that . . .’. In so doing, they are conjuring with thoughts about what might happen, or even about what could never really happen. By the age of 4, typically developing children demonstrate the capacity to imagine or understand the mental states (thoughts, beliefs, feelings) of others. To do so, they must recognise that another person’s belief about a situation may not be the same as their own or as the reality of the situation. Basic elements of such ‘mindedness’ probably develop much earlier than this (see, for instance, Hobson 2002).

Current theories about imagination in children, like evolutionary approaches, emphasise the central and interrelated roles of imaginative capacities in the development of advanced social and cognitive skills. For instance Leslie (1987) has described pretence as a developmentally early form of ‘meta-representation’. The representation ‘this is a banana’ is ‘decoupled’ from reality to allow acceptance of the proposition, in pretence, that ‘this is a telephone’. This, he argues, pre-figures a more general meta-representational capacity necessary for theory of mind, counterfactual thinking and many other forms of abstract thought. Other interpretations of pretence and meta-representation are offered by Perner (1990) and by Carruthers (2002). Hobson (2002) argues that the sources of childrens’ imaginative capacities lie not in cognitive mechanisms such as meta-representation, but in the infant’s innate capacity for emotional relatedness. From his/her cycle of interactions with carers the child comes to share others’ thoughts and experiences, and thus develops the capacity to take alternative roles or perspectives, which is involved in both pretence and in understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings.

Harris (2000) argues that children employ pretence partly in order to learn about reality. His claim that elements of reality are imported into pretence in order to ‘run through’ their consequences may explain why a pretend episode such as a fight can generate genuine emotional responses.
Harris’s model encompasses a wide range of childhood phenomena including imaginary companions, belief in magic and fairy stories. He views imagination as a sophisticated and logically coherent mode of cognition which often reinforces rather than disrupts the developing child’s grasp of social and physical reality.

A complete theory of the imagination needs to address how childhood phenomena such as pretence and fantasy relate to creative imagination. Clearly, the more inventive a child is, the more ideas they will have for use in pretend and fantasy scenarios. And engaging in these activities may itself stimulate further inventiveness. However, the childhood sources for creativity in its fullest sense, as the generation of highly original ideas and ‘products’ with cultural impact or value, is not fully understood.

See Further Reading for references

© Ilona Roth, 2004