Children are exposed to huge amounts of media -- the average child watches 32 hours of television and videos per week, in addition to playing video games and reading books. This media activity to some degree supplants the age-old childhood staple of pretend play. Yet little is known about how any of these activities impact children, and how the impacts compare among the different activities. How much and in what ways does participation in fictional worlds change children? The existing literature does offer a few suggestions. For example, children who watch violent acts on television are apt to imitate those acts, and very young children who watch more aggressive and entertainment-focused (non-educational) television are more apt to have attention problems later in life. On the positive side, children who watch more educational television have more positive outcomes in terms of language and school success. But how exactly does this work, given that children distinguish pretense and reality fairly well from an early age? Why doesn't the fictional world stay a world apart? And what are the extents of influence -- if television with aggressive content leads children to be more aggressive, does television with prosocial content lead them to be kinder? This research will examine how television, books, other media, and pretend play impact children, for better or for worse, and how the impacts differ when children encounter similar experiences in real life. It will focus particularly on three areas of potential impact: social behavior; executive function (their capacities for self-regulation, inhibitory control, and problem solving, for example); and attitudes towards people of different ethnic backgrounds. Children will be given pre-tests, then will be exposed to the fictional situation for a fixed amount of time, and finally will be given post-tests to measure the impacts of the situation.
The significance of this project lies in its contribution to a better understanding of how fiction influences children, with an eye to creating and advising parents on more positive fictional experiences for children's development. For example, in a pilot study, the PI found that watching just 9 minutes of the most popular television show today for children ages 2 to 11 lowered 4-year-olds' ability to self-regulate and delay gratification considerably, as compared to drawing or watching a different television show. It is vital that parents understand the influences such experiences have both immediately and over the long term. This research will help clarify our understanding so that parents and others working with children can make wiser choices about their children's fiction-related activities.
This project aimed to discover how children's exposure to and engagement in fictional worlds--pretend play, storybooks, and videos--can have real-life outcomes. We found that pretend play is often quarantined from the real world--it has little influence on real world outcomes, although we did find children can learn facts and functions about objects in pretend worlds that they transfer to real ones. Storybooks, on the other hand, flow easily into the real world--children act like characters in narratives which they have been read, and they glean lessons from storybooks that are intended to teach. From videos, children are less apt to learn lessons; furthermore, when videos show physically impossible events, children's executive function is reduced relative to when they watch other videos or play or read. This occurs even for educational shows that have physically impossible events. On the other hand, we saw far less imitation of aggressive actions than was observed in classic studies 50 years ago. We conducted a major review of over 150 studies on whether children learn from pretend play--an assumption made by many, and touted by major educational and medical organizations. Our conclusion from this review is that we actually don't have good evidence that children learn social skills, theory of mind, problem-solving, creativity, and so on from pretend play. Most of the existing studies were not well conducted, and those that were did not (with one exception--out of over 150) get positive results. Better research is needed on this important issue.
