If you are 19 months old, stay on the screen no matter what happens on the screen 

Open Mind (2021) 5: 71-90.

Available at: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00043

Commentary

Humans have a tendency to rely heavily on external representations such as drawings, maps, and animations.

And although animation has been familiar to us since infancy, and there have been studies on the subject, it is unknown how infants understand animation.

This study was investigating whether a 19-month-old child sees what is shown on the screen as happening here and now, or whether it is just a stream of events on the screen.

In Experiments 1 through 3, we found that.

When the ball is real（In Experiments 1 to 3, the infants were able to track the ball when 

(i) the ball was real and 

(ii) the box was real.

In Experiments 1-3, we tested the following

The results showed that the infants did not expect the falling animated ball to enter the box at the bottom of the screen.

In Experiment 4, we tested whether infants viewed the screen as a spatially restricted physical container through which objects could not pass.

When the two location cues pitted against each other, the infants were shown to individuate the animated protagonist by virtual location rather than physical location.

These analyses showed that 19-month-olds rejected the crossover between animation and reality, but they also accepted the depiction of the same animated environment on multiple screens.