ABSTRACT
This study focuses on whether or not young children transfer what they learn about a toy character from one setting to another (e.g. stuffed animal to computer game) and whether the interactivity of the toy and/or the age of the child has an effect. This study explores the following two questions: 1) How are children’s abilities to accurately link information to a toy character affected by the interactive nature of the toy? 2) Does the child’s age influence the information they generalize between media? Young children’s understanding of the relation between video and reality is far from complete (DeLouche, 1995, Melzoff, 1988), and there is high possibility that several factors may influence the transfer of information from one setting to another (Holyoak & Spellman, 1993). Thus if we want to prevent young children from conflating media and reality, it will be necessary to find explicit ways to help them mark the differences.
