The Effect of Realistic Contexts on Ontological Judgments of Novel Entities

How We Tell Apart Fiction from Reality

The human ability to tell apart reality from fiction is intriguing. Through a range of media, such as novels and movies, we are able to readily engage in fictional worlds and experience alternative realities. Yet even when we are completely immersed and emotionally engaged within these worlds, we have little difficulty in leaving the fictional landscapes and getting back to the day-to-day of our own world. How are we able to do this? How do we acquire our understanding of our real world? How is this similar to and different from the development of our knowledge of fictional worlds? In exploring these questions, this article makes the case for a novel multilevel explanation (called BLINCS) of our implicit understanding of the reality–fiction distinction, namely that it is derived from the fact that the worlds of fiction, relative to reality, are bounded, inference-light, curated, and sparse.

Can that really happen? Children's knowledge about the reality status of fantastical events in television

Although popular children's cartoons are replete with fantastical events, we know little about whether children understand that these events are fantastical rather than real. In Study 1, 54 children ages 4 to 6 years and 18 adults were shown 10 real and 10 fantastical events portrayed in 4s video clips from a popular cartoon. After viewing each clip, participants were asked to judge the reality status of the event and to explain their judgments. Results indicated that even 4-year-olds have a fairly good understanding of fantastical events in animated cartoons but that they underestimate the reality status of real events in such cartoons. In Study 2, 35 4- to 6-year-olds and 18 adults watched video clips of 10 real and 10 fantastical events performed by real people from a Chinese television show. Once again, 4-year-olds underestimated the reality status of real events shown on television. However, against the "real" backdrop in this study, 4-year-olds also judged nearly half of the fantastical events to be real. The implications for children's reality-fantasy discrimination and their media viewing are discussed.