Do infants see images on the TV as images, or would they actually think a face on the boob tube is another person ?
I found the lil’un cruising the house, looking for TV sets that were on - or looking for the remote. To spare such a horrid fate, I’m chucking the darn things and won’t be able to set up any experiments…
From what I’ve read, infants respond postively to images of other infants as well as various sorts of people, especially large face shots. I would presume that if it works for magazine pictures and photos being waved in the faces of babies by researchers, it would apply to the tube as well. Teletubbies, for one, capitalizes on this quite a bit (as well as the bright primary colors and repetitive vocal sounds) by occassionally showing a lot of baby faces. While my own son shows little to no interest in the television except to play with the remote, he does stop in his tracks if I flip the Teletubbies on and will watch in rapt awe for about five minutes before wandering away to pull all the VCR tapes out of their sleeves.
Duh… I misunderstood the OP
Or didn’t read it with both eyes or something
All I can say for if they think that the image is real is that Simon has never tried to interact with the TV screen, only watched it. While there may have been those kids who thought little people lived in the TV, I don’t think that the average child thinks that the close-up of a baby face is some gigantic kid trying to escape from his box 
Thanks, You got it on the second read. I didn’t write the question too well, anyway.
Perhaps I shoulda asked when/how do infants make the distinction between two-dimensional images and three ? Is it learned or “wired” ? etc…
While I know of no research on kids and TV, there have been studies to see at what age infants understand that their reflection is not another kid. The same prinicple would seem to apply to the realisation that TV is just a bunch of moving pictures. Considering that object permanence(the knowledge that an object still exists even if it cannot be seen and the reason kids love peek a boo) must be learned, I assume that the nature of TV must be learned as well.
As far as kids and TV, it is essential to their well being that they watch as much as possible. What could be more nourishing than the Boob Tube? Does the electronic baybsitter ever sleep on the job? By turning them into tater tots now, you can assure your kids a happy life as couch potatos!
What about pets? My dog will be inside and start barking like crazy if someone comes anywhere near the house. He must have some very keen hearing. But he doesn’t pay any attention to the multitude of strangers that show up on the Boob Tube. Why is that?
I thought it was fairly common for little kids to think the TV (and the radio, for that matter) were inhabited by little people. I vaguely recall going through a phase like that myself, lo these many years ago.
They must get used to it. When my dog was a puppy, everytime a door bell would ring, he would bark like mad - regardless if it was live or on the TV. Eventually, he learned the difference. (I have a funny story about that - but I’ll save it for some other time).
OTOH, there is some show that my friend, Joan, watches that has some birds flying across the screen during the closing of the show. To this day my friend’s dog runs around the TV looking for the birds.
Maybe it just depends on the dog.
Yeah, dogs and babies are pretty dumb and don’t understand the difference. I OTOH salivate when I see Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford or Sandra Bullock because of my superior capacity of appreciation
Ok, to redeem myself after not having even read the question properly the first time, I did a little digging for the proverbial Straight Dope. Reading Teletubbies & Early Childhood Development, we get the following quotes relevant to our discussion:
Understanding of the real world grows as children are exposed to the environment around them. In experiments studying very young children’s understanding of television, younger children are more likely to assume what they are seeing is actually a tangible object within the television set. With age, however, these children gain the understanding that the television images represent an absent reality. For example, if a television set was to be turned over, older children understand that the image on the screen will not fall over as well, while the younger children would expect the opposite (Chandler).
And…
Children as young as six months begin noticing and paying attention to the television. At this age young children can not follow complex stories, nor can they understand character development, they watch primarily in an “exploratory mode.” “They (infants) look for action rather than dialogue or conversation. They look for motion, color, music, sound and unusual voices,” reported one study on media literacy among toddlers (Media Literacy 90).
Children as young as six months are still in the process of acquiring language skills and possess only limited visual perception skills. Movement, bright colors and sounds can be seen and heard, but not understood by very young
children. Young children do not have control over the muscles that control the motion of their eyes or focus images within their eyes, thus young children are only aware of the difference between light from dark images and can only see objects directly in front of them (World Book 7).
Anyway, I’ll leave it at that. The original article is quite long, but if you’re interested in television and child development you might want to take a gander at it.
Jophiel & Doc - Thanks !
Of course. Everyone sees everything as images. 