Can a crab walk in the air or walk through walls? Impact of watching fantastical content on young children's cognitive skills

Executive function (EF) refers to high-order cognitive processes underlying conscious control of thought and action and is vital for children's social and academic success. Past studies showed that watching fantastical content has immediate negative effects on young children's executive function skills. Due to its unexpected and incomprehensible nature, fantastical content might tax cognitive resources, resulting in poor performances on subsequent EF tasks. There is yet no study investigating how long it takes for the negative effects to wear off and whether the negative effects apply or extend to other cognitive skills. The current experimental study aimed to (1) detect how long fantastical content affects children's EF performance, and (2) examine whether watching fantastical content negatively affects children's other (non-EF) cognitive task performance, namely mental rotation. One hundred twenty 5- to 6-year-old children (M(SD)=66(5.52) months) were randomly assigned to one of the four following conditions: a) immediate testing after watching an 8-min realistic cartoon (Caillou), b) immediate testing after watching an 8- min fantastical cartoon (SpongeBob), c) 10-min delayed testing after watching the fantastical cartoon, and d) immediate testing after an 8-min free play (control condition). After the experimental session, all children were tested on EF measures of working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, along with a measure of 2-D mental transformation. Results showed that children's performance for working memory in the fantastical cartoon-immediate testing condition was lower than in the control condition. Children in the fantastical cartoon-immediate testing condition performed worse in inhibitory control than children in the other three conditions. Groups did not differ on cognitive flexibility and mental transformation. As in previous studies, watching fantastical content negatively affected children's EFs (i.e., working memory and inhibitory control), but this negative impact disappeared in a few minutes and seems unique to EFs. These results suggest that fantastical content may temporarily affect attentional and information processing systems related to EFs, which may require more controlled activity than the processing of 2-D mental transformation.