Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 101, Issue 1, August 2006, Pages B9-B18
Cognition

Brief article
What does Batman think about SpongeBob? Children's understanding of the fantasy/fantasy distinction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.10.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Young children reliably distinguish reality from fantasy; they know that their friends are real and that Batman is not. But it is an open question whether they appreciate, as adults do, that there are multiple fantasy worlds. We test this by asking children and adults about fictional characters' beliefs about other characters who exist either within the same world (e.g., Batman and Robin) or in different worlds (e.g., Batman and SpongeBob). Study 1 found that although both adults and young children distinguish between within-world and across-world types of character relationships, the children make an unexpected mistake: they often claim that Batman thinks that Robin is make believe. Study 2 used a less explicit task, exploring intuitions about the actions of characters—whom they could see, touch, and talk to—and found that children show a mature appreciation of the ontology of fictional worlds.

Section snippets

Participants

Twenty-four adults (mean age=28 years, range=18–52, 10 women) and 24 children (mean age=4;10, range=3;7–6;2, 16 girls)1 participated in this study. The adults were recruited from universities and their surrounding areas and were given candy in exchange for their participation. The children were recruited either

Results and discussion

We scored ‘real’ answers as 1 and “make believe” answers as −1. Average responses that are significantly above chance (0) thus indicate an answer of ‘real;’ average responses significantly below chance indicate an answer of ‘make believe.’ See Fig. 1 for the average adult responses to the three types of questions, and Fig. 2 for the children's averages.

Reality/fantasy: Both adults and children make a reliable distinction between reality and fantasy. The average response in both age groups was

Participants

Twenty-five children (mean age=4;11, range=3;9–6;3, 15 girls) participated in this study. As with Study 1, the participants were recruited from either a laboratory database of families or from local preschools and day-care centers. An additional two children were tested but excluded from the final analyses for failing an attention-checking question (see below for details).

Stimuli and procedure

As in Study 1, we asked each child individually to select characters that he or she was familiar with, and we asked the

General discussion

Previous studies have concluded that children distinguish between what is real and what is fictional. The two current studies confirmed this conclusion using both explicit questions and questions that asked whether actions are possible across the reality/fantasy divide. We additionally found that both adults and children judge that characters from different worlds are fictional to each other, indicating that they divide the fictional space finely, perhaps creating a new fictional world for each

Acknowledgements

We thank the children, teachers, and parents of Forest Child Day Care, Children's Discovery Center, and the Dwight-Englewood Lower School for their participation in this project. We are also grateful to Frank Keil, Brian Scholl, Michael Weisberg, Karen Wynn, three anonymous reviewers, and all the members of the Language and Cognition lab for their helpful comments on this work.

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