Children are widely celebrated for their imaginations, but developmental research on this topic has often been fragmented or narrowly focused on fantasy. However, there is growing appreciation for the role that imagination plays in cognitive and emotional development, as well as its link withchildren's understanding of the real world. With their imaginations, children mentally transcend time, place, and/or circumstance to think about what might have been, plan and anticipate the future, create fictional relationships and worlds, and consider alternatives to the actual experiences oftheir lives.The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination provides a comprehensive overview of this broad new perspective by bringing together leading researchers whose findings are moving the study of imagination from the margins of mainstream psychology to a central role in current efforts tounderstand human thought. The topics covered include fantasy-reality distinctions, pretend play, magical thinking, narrative, anthropomorphism, counterfactual reasoning, mental time travel, creativity, paracosms, imaginary companions, imagination in non-human animals, the evolution of imagination,autism, dissociation, and the capacity to derive real life resilience from imaginative experiences. Many of the chapters include discussions of the educational, clinical, and legal implications of the research findings and special attention is given to suggestions for future research.

Part One • Introduction

1. Transcending Time, Place, and/or Circumstance: An Introduction 3

2. Historical Overview of Research on Imagination in Children 11

Part Two • Fantasy-Reality Distinctions

3. Fairy Tales, History, and Religion 31

4. Magical Thinking 42

5. Beliefs in Magical Beings and Cultural Myths 61

6. Distinguishing Imagination from Reality 75

7. Children's Source Monitoring of Memories for Imagination 94

8. Suggestibility and Imagination in Early Childhood 113

9. Child Witnesses and Imagination: Lying, Hypothetical Reasoning, and Referential Ambiguity 126

10. Fictional Worlds, the Neuroscience of the Imagination, and Childhood Education 137

Part Three • Pretend Play and Narrative

11. Executive Function, Pretend Play, and Imagination 161

12. The Distinction between Role-Play and Object Substitution in Pretend Play 175

13. How Do Children Represent Pretend Play? 186

14. Culture, Narrative, and Imagination 196

15. Flux and Flow in Children's Narratives 212

16. Pretend Play as Culturally Constructed Activity 224

Part Four • Imagining the Self and Other

17. Imaginary Relationships 251

18. Imagining Other Minds: Anthropomorphism Is Hair-Triggered but Not Hare-Brained 272

19. Imagination and the Self 288

Part Five • Mental Time Travel, Counterfactual Thinking, and Causality

20. Future Thinking in Young Children 305

21. Counterfactuals and Reality 325

22. Causality and Imagination 342

23. What Children Understand About the Flow of Mental Life 359

Part Six • Creativity

24. Imagination and Personal Creativity 379

25. Individual Differences in the Development of Social Creativity 387

26. The Relationship Between Pretend Play and Creativity 403

27. The Creation oflmaginary Worlds 417

28. The Influence of Television, Video Games, and che Internee on Children's Creativity 438

Part Seven • Comparative Issues

29. On the Evolution oflmaginacion and Design 453

30. The Comparative Study oflmagination 468

Part Eight • Clinical Issues

31. Imagination and Dissociation Across the Life Span 489

32. The Development oflmagination in Children with Autism 499

33. The Role of Pretend Play in Child Psychotherapy 516

34. Imagination-Based Interventions with Children 529

35. Telling Srories: Accessing Narrative Imagination for Use in Assessment with Clinical and Typical Populations 539

36. Imagination and Coping with Chronic Illness 550

Part Nine • Conclusion

37. Looking Ahead: Some Thoughts About Future Directions 563

Index 571

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