Early accounts of the development of the imagination portrayed young children as fantasy prone. For example, echoing Freudian claims, Piaget emphasized the early dominance of fantasy over reality based thinking (Harris, 1997, 2000; Piaget, 1923). On that classic account, a more objective and reality oriented stance emerges slowly in the course of development, displacing children’s tendency toward unrealistic fantasy. As described in the introduction, more recent studies of pretend play have analyzed the intriguing individual differences among young children in their disposition to become engaged in a make-believe world where they invent imaginary companions or indeed whole communities. Neither of these accounts has focused on the connections between children’s understanding of reality and their imaginative activities. Yet those connections are apparent from an early age in children’s pretend play. Moreover, such connections persist into adulthood because the recall of past reality is likely to impact the way in which the future is envisioned. Indeed, to the extent that older children and adults must plan a variety of short and long-term activities, the intimate connection between knowledge of reality and the contemplation of future possibilities is likely to be a stable feature of mature thinking. Besides this enduring connection, the present review has also pointed to plausible developmental changes. Commensurate with their developing recall of the past, children should be increasingly able to envisage what might happen in the future and to plan appropriately for contingencies that might arise. In addition, insofar as children critically appraise the products of their imagination, they can increasingly differentiate between what cannot possibly happen and what might conceivably happen even if it is improbable.
Moreover, in the course of development, children show signs of greater inventiveness. Faced with a problem whose solution is specified in an ill-structured fashion, older children are more adroit than younger children at identifying a workable solution from among the range of possibilities. They are able to entertain a solution in their imagination and to set about executing that solution, whether it involves the manufacture of a tool or the drawing of a non-existent entity. In each of these cases, there is a striking gap between the difficulties that young children display when left to their own devices—that is, when left to decide what tool to make or what novel entity to draw—and the relatively successful performance they display when given an external prompt. Thus, in each case, young children’s difficulties lie in the autonomous generation of a mental template or plan of action but if that is supplied externally, they succeed. This account of the imagination opens up several potentially fruitful avenues for developmental research. First, it invites further analysis of the extent to which reality-based constraints continue to guide children’s imagination in the course of development. Consider, for example, the development of counterfactual thinking (Nyhout & Ganea, 2019). According to the present account, children should typically generate counterfactual alternatives that are closely tied to realistic possibilities even if they are receptive to more exotic possibilities when those are presented to them. Consistent with these predictions, when 6- to 11-year-olds were invited to generate counterfactual thoughts in the wake of a negative outcome (e.g., a farmer’s poor harvest), almost all of their proposals involved naturalistic alternatives (e.g., “If only he had watered them more”; Botsolis, De la Vina, Payir, Harris, & Cor- ~iveau, 2019). Thus, non-naturalistic alternatives (e.g., “He could have prayed”) were rarely pro- posed. Nevertheless, children who were receiving a religious education systematically endorsed the plausibility of such alternatives when explicitly presented with them. Second, this account invites further consideration of the ways in which children’s imagination can be used in the classroom. As noted in the discussion of thought experiments, children’s reality-based imagi nation is a positive advantage if they deploy it to contemplate the way that reality operates. In particular, prompting children to entertain various physical or social scenarios, and to contemplate how they might play out, may help them to overcome natıve or unreflecting intuitions. Thought experiments have played a major role in the history of philosophy and science, but their pedagogic benefits have rarely been explored in the classroom.
Finally, this account invites more research on how cultural input can scaffold and ultimately shape the development of the imagination. Young children learn about the world from direct observation and, as argued in this article, that empirical observation of reality guides their early imaginative activities. Nevertheless, the evidence also shows that children are often receptive to imagining possibilities introduced by other people. For example, when it is enacted by a play partner, they readily imagine a pig squirted with ketchup; when explicitly prompted to do so, they can imagine the no vertical trajectory of a ball rolling down a sloping tube; and when cued by an adult, they can imagine a tool or non-existent entity that they proceed to make or draw. More generally, children also learn about the world and its possibilities from cultural input in the form of toys, stories, explanations, drawings, films, and cartoons, typically created and supplied by adults (Harris & Koenig 2006; Singer & Singer, 1990; Woolley & Cornelius,2013). Some of that cultural input can expand children’s understanding of reality. Thus, on the basis of stories and films, they can contemplate in their imagination remote places and events that they can- not easily observe first-hand. Other forms of cultural input are likely to override rather than simply expand children’s conception of reality. Thus, the supernatural powers described in religious narratives, the unobservable entities invoked in science, and the alternative possibilities represented in fiction, will also feed children’s imagination, leading them to set aside the known constraints of everyday reality. By implication, the direction that children’s imagination takes in the course of development is likely to be strongly inflected by the representations—in religion, science, and fiction that they encounter in the surrounding culture.