Michelle Downes

Good morning, David.

How are you?

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

And imagination is so important and pretend play in early childhood.

And as you said, this idea, the skill, I suppose, emerges in that second year of life.

And at first it's really basic things like a child pretending there's tea in a cup or pretending a banana is a phone.

And then as they get closer to their third year, it becomes more complicated.

They start acting out.

scenes, imitating maybe narratives that they've seen, like going to the doctor.

And as they get to age three, age four, it becomes a lot more social, a lot more interactive.

And they can play with their peers and recreate these imaginary worlds where they take on character roles and have really complex structures.

So it doesn't emerge spontaneously.

It's emerging in parallel with lots of other emerging skills.

So we know that pretend play is highly linked to other emerging cognitive skills.

So we recently published a paper in the lab looking at the development of executive functioning and pretend play.

But we know pretend play is also important for other skills like language development, social development.

It gives children opportunities to cultivate these skills by practising and imagining scenarios.

Yeah absolutely so that's one of my core interest areas and executive functioning is the ability to control and regulate our behaviour so it's a skill that emerges in the first year of life and actually has a very protracted period of development so this skill is maturing right up until emerging adulthood in your early 20s until it fully matures and

Underlying that is our frontal parietal systems in the brain, which are slowly emerging and maturing as well.

And it's a collective term.