How do babies interpret what they see on a screen? Can they differentiate between virtual and real objects, characters, and events, or do they think they could try the toy car on TV just like the one next to them on the carpet? Find out more about this exciting new project of the CEU Cognitive Development Center.
According to the results of a project by CEU Cognitive Development Center researcher Barbu Revencu and Professor Gergely Csibra, babies can already differentiate between the physical and virtual world at 19 months of age. The paper "For 19-Month-Olds, What Happens On-Screen Stays On-Screen" was published on September 10 in Open Mind.
To find out whether babies think that the world on the screen is different from its surroundings, they designed a simple game for the 19-month-olds. The infants saw a ball rolling down on a seesaw, which had a box under both of its endpoints. The part where the ball fell in the box was covered with an occluder. The children's task was to show where the ball ended up.
The researchers presented three versions of this game to the babies: in one, both the ball and the boxes were real, in another, all of them were virtual, and in the third version the ball was animated, but the boxes were real. In the first two versions, babies usually pointed at the box toward which they saw the ball rolling. However, if the ball and the boxes were qualitatively different (one virtual, one real), babies often pointed at the middle of the screen or chose randomly from the boxes, regardless of the ball's movements, concluding that 19-month-olds didn't think that the ball they saw on the screen could exit the boundaries of the screen and end up in the real boxes.
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