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