A banana held to the ear, a saucepan worn as a helmet, a cardboard box turned into a rocket, children everywhere transform household objects into toys, and parents often dismiss it as silliness. Psychology research suggests otherwise. According to Simone Bijvoet-van den Berg and Elena Hoicka, writing in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 2019, preschoolers invent their own pretend uses for everyday objects instead of copying adults. Candice Mottweiler’s 2013 chapter in the Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination likewise treats object substitution as a distinct facet of pretend play. Here is what the evidence actually shows.
What psychologists mean by object substitution in pretend play
30 Sept 2026 | 13:16
Does your child come to you when upset, or do they prefer to deal with their emotions alone?
Object substitution happens when a child uses one thing to stand in for another, such as treating a banana as a telephone. In their paper in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Bijvoet-van den Berg and Hoicka explain that the skill requires a child to hold back the usual action for an object while performing the action that belongs to a different one. It is a demanding mental trick for someone so small, and the authors note that observational research suggests children begin doing it during free play from around the age of two.
The experiment that tested whether preschoolers invent their own pretend uses for everyday objects
The study, titled “Preschoolers understand and generate pretend actions using object substitution,” appeared in volume 177 of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, published by Elsevier in January 2019. Hoicka is affiliated with the School of Education at the University of Bristol, and the project was funded by a doctoral studentship from the Department of Psychology at the University of Stirling, awarded to Bijvoet-van den Berg.The researchers began with a gap in the existing science. As their abstract explains, pretend play is widely considered imaginative, yet earlier experiments mostly tested whether children imitated pretending, followed instructions to pretend, or understood other people’s pretending. Nobody could be sure that children’s pretend play was genuinely new.To find out, Bijvoet-van den Berg and Hoicka ran two experiments. In the first, 45 children aged three and four watched an experimenter use one object as another, with signals showing that she was either pretending or genuinely trying to do something. The children copied the pretend actions and corrected the trying actions. When her intentions were made explicit, they produced significantly more novel substitutions in the pretend setting, ones she had neither demonstrated nor asked for. A second study with 34 three-year-olds replicated the results.The authors’ conclusion, stated in the highlights of the paper, is that preschoolers are truly novel in their play and do not simply imitate others’ pretending.
Why clear pretend signals matter when young children play with everyday items
The study also revealed how children read a situation. Bijvoet-van den Berg and Hoicka found that preschoolers need explicit cues, such as the word “pretend,” to understand when someone else is pretending. Children were not mechanically copying whatever an adult did with an object. They were working out the adult’s intention and responding to it.
As their abstract explains, pretend play is widely considered imaginative (Image: Canva)
What the research does not yet prove about imagination and creative thinking
The findings come with an important limit. The second study found no relationship between children’s copying or generating of object substitutions and their scores on measures of divergent thinking, inhibitory control, or pretending during free play. The evidence shows that young children genuinely invent, but it does not show that the children who do so most are measurably more creative than their peers. Whether household-object play predicts later creativity remains an open question.
How the Oxford Handbook places object substitution within the wider development of imagination
Candice Mottweiler takes up the topic in her 2013 chapter, “The Distinction Between Role-Play and Object Substitution in Pretend Play,” published on Oxford Academic in The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination. The abstract opens by arguing that a richer understanding of pretend play depends on identifying its various facets and the function of each. In that framing, turning a spoon into a microphone is its own strand of imaginative development, separate from acting out a character.
What parents can take from the research on children’s pretend play
The next time a child turns a spoon into a microphone or a colander into a hat, the Bijvoet-van den Berg and Hoicka findings suggest there may be real invention behind it, not just an echo of something the child has seen. Because the same study found no link to creativity measures, the play is best understood as a window into how young minds work and not as a test of talent. What it does show is that even very young children can look at an ordinary object and decide, on their own, that it is something else.