As children grow into adulthood and then continue ageing, what happens to their imagination? Do all of us gradually lose our innate capacity to conjure up novelty to the drudgery of life, or does experience teach us to fine-tune it? Paul Harris, a developmental psychologist at Harvard University, has argued that imagination gets better with age, stating in a 2021 review that young children’s pretend play generally sticks to “everyday regularities”; only later do they start imagining dramatic counterfactuals. In particular, Harris points to an apparent shift around the age of 4, when children start to be able to…
