most interested in texts with, for example, significant levels of tension. Children who use more fantastical pretense themes tend to understand the concept of pretense at an earlier stage. Although stories and acting inspire creativity in pretend play, long durations of television exposure has been associated with lower levels of imagination. Social and cognitive development The presence of a relationship between pretend play and the following cognitive and social skills suggests that pretend play may have a causal effect. Current research attempts to investigate how pretend play can be used to develop and improve performances in theory of mind tasks, reasoning skills, and how it can be used as an intervention method, especially for children with autism. Most research emphasizes on the preschool period since this age group shows the greatest emergence and development in pretend play and the following social and cognitive skills. Research on preschool children also seek to integrate pretend play as a teaching method. Theory of mind Pretend play encompasses several abilities that coincide with theory of mind. The first two abilities relate to object representation. The child has the ability to mentally represent one object as another. The child also has the ability to understand the paradox, in which the object can represent another, but in essence remains the same object. This means that the child is required to hold two contradicting mental representations of the same object. In 3 year olds, this cognitive ability is evident in pretend play but not in other activities. For example, the child can pretend that a pen is a toothbrush, but when shown an apple-shaped soap bar, the child is unable to comprehend the real and apparent features of the object. This inability is referred to as mutual exclusivity bias. However, development of pretend play has been found to correlate with performances in the previous example along with performances in the false-belief task, which also tests a child's understanding of mental representations. Children begin to pass the false belief task at around the age of 4. The third ability is related to social representation, in which the child is able to represent another individual's mental representations, such as desires, thoughts, and feelings. This ability appears when a child is about 5 years old. It enables the child to take the perspective of others and strengthens their understanding of others' thoughts and beliefs. By this age, children are aware