Mental representation.
Mental representations are internal depictions of information that of environments that support play these children had better cognitive (and language) performance at age 7 than their peers.
Other research shows that pretend play strengthens cognitive capacities, including sustained attention, memory, logical reasoning, language and literacy skills, imagination, creativity, understanding of emotions, and the ability to reflect on one's own thinking, inhibit impulses, control one's behavior, and take another person's perspective .
Executive functioning
During the preschool years, the brain's cerebral cortex and the functions that ultimately regulate children's attention and memory are not fully developed, which accounts for some of the limitations in their capacity to reason and solve problems. They also haven't had as much experience as older children in being taught what to pay attention to or how to remember things, opportunity to practice self-regulation skills through sociodramatic play, and other environmentally supportive experiences. During the preschool years as children have more instruction and opportunity to practice information processing skills related to attention and memory, their skills improve.
Attention
Attention is crucial to our thinking because it decides what information will influence the task at hand. The ability to focus attention and concentrate enhances academic learning, including language acquisition and problem solving, as well as social skills and cooperation. As teachers know, preschoolers may have trouble focusing on details, spend only a short time on most tasks, and tend to be more distractible than older children, especially when required to listen passively or work on a prescribed task. But attention does become more sustained and under the child's control over the course of the preschool years.
For example, young preschoolers usually are not able to apply an attention strategy, whereas older preschoolers can use simple strategies. In one study, when doing a task in which the best strategy was to open only those doors with certain pictures on them (some doors pictured a type of house and other doors pictured a type of animal), 3 and 4 year olds simply opened all the doors. But by age 5, children began to apply a selective strategy of opening only those doors with the relevant pictures on them at least most of the time.
Memory
As attention improves, so does memory and, more specifically, children's use of memory strategies. Memory strategies are deliberate mental activities that allow us to hold information first in working memory and then to transfer it to long-term memory. Preschoolers begin to use memory strategies, but these take so much effort and concentration that they are not very useful at first. As with other skills, memory strategies improve as preschoolers have opportunity and guidance to practice them.
Magical thinking
Young children's reasoning is influenced by their tendency toward magical thinking and animism that is, giving lifelike qualities to inanimate objects. They may mistakenly think, for instance, that certain vehicles such as trains airplanes can be living or creatures they move-not surprising as because the objects are sometimes depicted with lifelike features, such as headlights that look like eyes and appear to move on their own. Or children might think a vacuum cleaner is a monster, or a thunderstorm means that God is angry.