How Infants Perceive Animated Films

Today, many infants begin consistently viewing videos at 4 to 9 months of age. Due to their reduced mobility and linguistic immaturity younger infants are good watchers, spending a lot of time sitting and watching the actions and (also emotional) reactions of both real and televised people as well as animated characters. Since babies can perceive the similarity between a 2-dimensional image and the real 3-dimensional entity that is depicted, they respond to the video image of another person with smiles and increased activity, much as they would to the actual person. Furthermore, emotional reaction of a televised person can influence their behaviour. Infant attention to films as to natural scenes begins by being stimulus-driven and progresses to top-down control as the child matures cognitively and acquires general world knowledge. The producers of infant-directed animations however use low-level visual features to guide infants’ attention to semantic information which might explain infants’ preference for them. In this chapter, we will discuss the developmental foundations of (animated) film cognition, focusing mainly on the perception of emotional cues based on recent empirical findings.