For 19-Month-Olds, What Happens On the Screen Stays On the Screen

Barbu Revencu, Gergely Csibra

Research output: Contribution to conference typesPaperpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Fictional entities in animations and puppet shows are widely used in infancy research, and there is plenty of evidence suggesting that infants are able to make inferences about them (e.g., ascribing agency to self-propelled 2-D figures). In the present set of experiments, we asked whether 19-month-olds take what they see on the screen to be happening in the here and now, or whether they think that on-screen events are spatiotemporally decoupled from the immediate environment. We found that infants do not expect an animated ball falling on a screen to end up in real boxes below the screen, even though they can track the ball (i) when the ball is real, and (ii) when the boxes are also part of the animation. These findings indicate that infants separate animations from the surrounding environment and cast doubt on the assumption that infants are naïve realists about iconic representations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages508-513
Number of pages6
StatePublished - 2020
Event42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Developing a Mind: Learning in Humans, Animals, and Machines, CogSci 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 29 Jul 20201 Aug 2020

Conference

Conference42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Developing a Mind: Learning in Humans, Animals, and Machines, CogSci 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period29/07/201/08/20

Keywords

  • animation
  • development
  • fiction
  • methodology
  • representations

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