Children see rabbit, not Peter: Young children’s responses to an Anthropomorphic Picture Scale

Previous research suggests that character realism influences children’s responses to stories. This study explored 3- to 7-year-old children’s ratings of thought, feeling, self-knowledge and intention for humans, real animals and anthropomorphised animal characters. Ratings were similar for real and anthropomorphised animals and significantly lower than those for humans. These findings may relate to the observed poorer outcomes following stories depicting anthropomorphic animals, relative to human characters. Individual differences in internal state attribution and corresponding responses to anthropomorphised narratives might be usefully explored with this scale.