Preschoolers’ Quarantining of Fantasy Stories

Abstract

Preschool-aged children are exposed to fantasy stories with the expectation that they will learn messages in those stories that are applied to real-world situations. We examined children's transfer from fantastical and real stories. Over the course of 2 studies, 3½-to 5½-year-old children were less likely to transfer problem solutions from stories about fantasy characters than stories about real people. A combined analysis of the participants in the 2 studies revealed that the factors predicting transfer differed for the fantasy and real stories. These findings are discussed within the context of their implications for preschoolers' developing boundaries between fantasy and real worlds.

Pretend Play as a Context for Learning New Information

“…In some cases, higher fantasy orientation predicted greater movement of information across the fantasy/reality boundary (Boerger, Tullos, & Woolley, 2009;, suggesting that children who engage with fantasy frequently may blur the lines between fantasy and reality: for example, children with higher fantasy orientation were more likely to believe in a novel fantasy character (Boerger et al, 2009;Woolley et al, 2004). In other studies, however, higher fantasy orientation has predicted better fantasy/reality discrimination (Sharon & Woolley, 2004) and less transfer from fantasy contexts (Richert & Smith, 2011), suggesting that children who engage with fantasy frequently are more practiced at maintaining the boundary between pretense and reality.…”

“…When books used anthropomorphized illustrations and descriptions of novel animals, preschoolers were less likely to learn novel facts about those animals (Ganea, Canfield, Simons, & Chou, 2014). Similarly, preschoolers were less likely to transfer novel problem-solving strategies (Richert & Smith, 2011;Richert, Shawber, Hoffman, & Taylor, 2009) or novel causal principles (Walker, Ganea, & Gopnik, 2012) from fantastical stories than from realistic ones.…”

“…A few studies have looked directly at children's ability to solve problems after learning about an analogous solution in a fictional source. Richert and colleagues (Richert et al, 2009;Richert & Smith, 2011) read children stories in which a protagonist used a novel solution to solve a problem; for example, a teacher had more apples than she could carry and so wrapped them up in a blanket to bring them to her students. Children were later given an analogous problem to solve: They had to move marbles to the other side of the room and could use a towel to wrap them up and carry them.…”

“…Based on the research reviewed in this section, we identified several factors common to fantasy stories that could interfere with the process of analogical transfer: setting the story on a fictional planet, using illustrations that are dissimilar to the real world, including fantasy creatures like dragons, and incorporating violations of physical causality. Using a procedure based on Richert and Smith (2011), children were read a story in which a character solved a novel problem (rolled a magazine into a tube to move dog food into an out-of-reach bowl). Children were then given an analogous problem to solve on their own (moving marbles into a bowl that was out of reach inside a large box).…”

“…Thus far, we have seen that children can learn new information from stories, including novel object labels (Ganea et al, 2008), biological information (Ganea et al, 2011;Kelemen et al, 2014), and problem-solving strategies Richert et al, 2009;Richert & Smith, 2011); learning is generally greater when the stories are realistic than when they are unrealistic, cartoonish, or fantastical. However, stories are not the only type of fictional world with which children engage, and relatively few studies have looked at transfer of information from pretend play, another form of fiction that is prevalent in the lives of young children.…”