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The ability to distinguish multiple fantasy worlds may be an innate skill. “Children’s metaphysical reasoning is much more complicated than previously thought,” says Deena Skolnick, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University.
In a recent study entitled “What Does Batman Think about SpongeBob?” Skolnick and Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom asked 24 adults and 24 children ages four to six questions about familiar fictional characters. For example: Is Batman real? Does Batman think Robin is real? Does Batman think Nemo is real? (For those playing at home, the popular answers kids gave were no, yes, no.) In most cases, the youngsters’ responses closely matched the adults’. Notably, the kid crusaders did not simply place all make-believe characters in one universe.
To further test the claim that children make this multiworld distinction on their own, the dynamic duo now plans to test three-year-olds and also to explore how kids deal with their own pretend worlds. “Our hunch is that certain facts about how fiction works are not learned; they are natural by-products of the architecture of the human imagination,” Bloom explains. That would mean that the flight of fancy needed to write a novel or appreciate a blockbuster might spring from the same skills we use to predict what might be happening around a corner ahead of us or in an upcoming week. From the everyday to the extraordinary, we spend much of our lives immersed in hypothetical scenarios, and Skolnick hopes to track how we manage them all. The cartoon query, she says, “is just a first step.”
