We also examined child pretense and imitation of pretense when children engaged in imitationand transformation tasks with an experimenter. We found that younger children engaged in less pretense than older children, and children at all ages pretended most frequently during conventional imitation tasks, followed by causal transformation tasks. They pretended least frequently at all agesduring counter-conventional imitation tasks. In contrast, younger children, particularly 15-month-olds, engaged in more imitation than older children. While 18-month-old children’s imitation did notvary between EE tasks, younger children imitated most frequently during conventional imitation ascompared to the other tasks. Thus, there is asymmetry between our findings from natural interactionsand more structured pretense tasks. In both settings, child pretense increased with age. However, during natural interactions with mothers, their imitation did not vary with age, where as during structured pretense tasks with the experimenter, child imitation peaked at 15 months and then decreased. Eventhough we attempted to remove task-related demands from our imitation and causal transformationtasks (e.g., using one prop instead of two), these tasks may have been too challenging for young children and ambiguous with respect to the role children had to assume in these play scenarios. Thus, it ispossible that through imitation young pretenders attempted to disambiguate the pretense situation,and as children’s pretense abilities became stronger and more readily available to them, imitationdecreased with age.