Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, USA.
Soc Neurosci. 2013;8(4):356-68. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2013.807872.
Pretend play emerges in children the world over around 18 months and continues into adolescence and even adulthood. Observing and engaging in pretense are thought to rely on similar neural mechanisms, but little is known about them. Here we examined neural activation patterns associated with observing pretense acts, including high-likelihood, low-likelihood, and imaginary substitute objects, as compared with activation patterns when observing parallel real acts. The association between fantasy predisposition and cortical representations of pretense was also explored. Supporting prior research that used more limited types of pretense, observed pretense acts, when contrasted with real acts, elicited activity in regions associated with mentalizing. A novel contribution here is that substitute object pretense (high- and low-likelihood) elicited significantly more activity than imaginary (pantomime) acts not only in theory of mind regions but also in the superior parietal lobule, a region thought to aid in the prediction and error-monitoring of motor actions. Finally, when high-likelihood pretense acts were contrasted with real acts, participants with elevated fantasy predispositions evidenced significantly different activation patterns than their more reality-prone peers. Future research will explore the intersection of fantasy predisposition and experience with the neural representation of pretense.
假装游戏在世界各地的儿童中大约在 18 个月时出现，并持续到青少年甚至成年期。人们认为观察和参与假装依赖于类似的神经机制，但对这些机制知之甚少。在这里，我们研究了与观察假装行为相关的神经激活模式，包括高可能性、低可能性和想象替代物，以及与观察平行真实行为时的激活模式相比。还探讨了幻想倾向与假装的皮质代表之间的关联。支持先前使用更有限类型的假装的研究，与真实行为相比，观察到的假装行为在与心理理论相关的区域中引起了活动。这里的一个新贡献是，替代物假装（高可能性和低可能性）不仅在心理理论区域，而且在被认为有助于运动动作预测和错误监测的顶叶上回，引起的活动明显多于想象（哑剧）行为。最后，当高可能性的假装行为与真实行为进行对比时，具有较高幻想倾向的参与者的激活模式与他们更倾向于现实的同龄人明显不同。未来的研究将探索幻想倾向和经验与假装的神经表现之间的交叉点。
