Pretend Comprehension Enhances Social and Exploratory Behaviors in Human Toddlers and Adults

Pretend play is a hallmark behavior in childhood where children create nonliteral meanings. Empirical data supporting the role of social cognition and the decoupling from literality are still scarce during early development. Here we examined how the comprehension of pretense modulates visual exploration in 19-month-old toddlers (n = 44) and adults (n = 65) when they were exposed to short videos with an actress performing either real actions (e.g., eating jelly) or pretend actions (e.g., pretending to eat with imaginary food), while varying the complexity of those actions. We analyzed participants exploration of the actresss face as exploitation of social information. We showed that all observers paid more attention to the face in pretend episodes than in real ones, measured as longer total looking time in adults and more fixations and revisits to the face in both age groups. We also found more gaze shifts (a measure of information sampling) between the face and the moving hand in pretense across age groups, mainly at the initial stages of the actions. Additionally, analyses of the scanpaths structure using gaze entropy revealed less order in the exploration of pretend movies at both ages. Both social and visual trajectory effects emerged mostly in complex pretense actions. Together, our results indicate that from its developmental origins, the comprehension of pretense relies on social inferential processes linked with information seeking and exploration.