Play where a dragon breathes fire and a child blasts off to the moon—scenarios that don’t exist in reality. A randomized experiment showed that this “absurd” imagining lifts a child’s executive function.

Your child is playing house. She feeds a doll, plays doctor, becomes a shopkeeper. You watch fondly—but part of you wonders. How is this any different from just messing around? Wouldn’t it be better to spend this time on one more number or letter?

But play may not all be the same play. In particular, play that imagines things that don’t exist in reality—dragons, magic, space travel—may have a special role in a child’s brain development. And this study isn’t mere observation; it’s a randomized experiment, which takes it one step beyond “there’s a correlation” toward “it has an effect.”

First, What Is Executive Function?

What this study focused on is executive functions (EF). The term sounds technical, but the core idea is simple. Holding information in mind (working memory), suppressing impulses (inhibition), and switching your thinking as the situation changes (attention shifting)—EF is the “control tower” of the brain that oversees all of this.

Executive function is tied to academic achievement, peer relationships, and emotional regulation alike. So how to nurture it early has long been a question for education and psychology research.

A number of studies had reported a correlation: children higher in “fantasy orientation”—a tendency to play in an imaginative realm beyond reality—also scored higher on executive function. But correlation can’t tell you direction. Did imaginative play sharpen their minds, or did already-sharp children simply enjoy imaginative play more? It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.

The Core Research Question

To sort out that order, a team at the University of Alabama designed an experiment.

“When children are led to engage in fantastical pretend-play, does their executive function actually improve?”

This was an attempt to confirm not correlation but causation—and even its direction.

How They Studied It: A Five-Week, Three-Group Experiment

The researchers randomly assigned 110 children aged 3 to 5 to three groups. Random assignment is the study’s key device. Drawing children by lot prevents the naturally bright ones from clustering in one group, so any “difference between groups” can be read as “the effect of the intervention.”

The three groups broke down like this.

Group 1. Fantastical pretend-play

A research assistant led small groups of children to invent and act out scenarios that don’t exist in reality—boarding a spaceship for the moon, meeting a dragon. The point wasn’t reenacting daily life like “playing doctor,” but building an impossible world in the mind and acting inside it.

Group 2. Non-imaginative play

For the same amount of time, under the same adult guidance, these children played—but with activities containing no imaginative element (puzzles, crafts). It’s a comparison group from which only the single ingredient of “imagination” has been removed.

Group 3. Business-as-usual control

No special intervention; they carried on as usual.

Groups 1 and 2 had daily play sessions of about 15 minutes over five weeks. Then every child’s executive function was measured before and after to compare the change.

The Results: Only the “Fantasy” Group’s Minds Grew

The results were clear.

  • Only Group 1, the fantastical pretend-play group, showed a significant improvement in executive function (working memory, attention shifting, and so on).
  • Group 2 (non-imaginative play) and Group 3 (control) showed no change.

For the same amount of time, with the same adult, having “played” in the same way, the outcomes diverged. The single difference between them was: did the child imagine something that doesn’t exist?

There’s an even more interesting finding here. Within the fantasy group, the children who were most deeply engaged in the play, and those who played most fantastically, showed the largest gains in executive function. The thicker the “concentration” of imagination, the bigger the effect.

Why “Fantasy” Specifically?

This is the part most worth chewing on. Why does the mind grow with absurd imagining rather than ordinary play?

Building a non-existent world and playing inside it actually demands enormous mental work. “I’m an astronaut,” “this chair is a spaceship,” “outside the window is space”—you must simultaneously hold a set of rules that differ from the reality in front of you (working memory), suppress the urge to slip back into actual reality (inhibition), and keep changing the setup as the story unfolds (attention shifting).

In other words, fantasy play is itself a training ground that runs executive function at full throttle. Play that merely copies reality creates less of this load. The team described fantasy-oriented play as one of many possible routes to building executive function.

Practical Implications

“What kind of play” matters as much as “how much play”

Beyond just filling play time, it’s meaningful to help a child unfold an imaginary world. Try building non-existent settings together—dragons, magic, outer space.

An adult just has to set the stage

What produced the effect in this experiment wasn’t leaving the child alone, but an adult co-leading the fantasy scenario. A single line like “If this were a spaceship, where would we go?” is the starting point.

No expensive toys required

Fifteen minutes a day, one chair, and imagination were enough. The key ingredient isn’t a toy but an “impossible story.”

Limitations

That this study is an RCT approaching causation is a strength, but a few things deserve noting.

  • With 110 children split into three groups, that’s roughly 30–40 per group. It’s hard to call the sample large.
  • The intervention lasted five weeks, too short to tell how long the effect persists.
  • It measured some facets of executive function (working memory, attention shifting), not all of them.
  • The within-group finding that “higher engagement and fantasy meant larger gains” is once again a correlation, so that part alone can’t be declared causal.

Even so, by using a randomized experiment to show the direction of “fantasy play → executive function gains,” this study adds a layer of weight on top of the correlational work.

Closing

What grows a child’s brain may not be “time spent playing,” but the “labor of imagination” of building a non-existent world in the mind.

If you’ve been watching pretend-play go by with a blank stare, add one thing today. “What if this room were actually a cave where a dragon lives?” The play that begins with that absurd line may be quietly training the control tower inside your child’s head.

Source: Thibodeau, R. B., Gilpin, A. T., Brown, M. M., & Meyer, B. A. (2016). The effects of fantastical pretend-play on the development of executive functions: An intervention study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 145, 120–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2016.01.001