Children's Perceptions of Characters: Human versus Animate Assessing Implications for Children's Advertising

Abstract Abstract This study seeks to investigate the perceptual properties of kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade students toward a stimulus set consisting of human and animate characters. The rationale is based on the potential deceptiveness of animation and possible ethical and legal problems which may emanate from the use of cartoon characters in promotion. The results of scaling judged similarity data revealed that the school-grade categories in question had similar perceptual structures and that an animate/human perceptual cue is apparently impacting on perceptions. The results also point to the viability of multidimensional scaling and the usage of simplistic judged similarities in the measurement of children's perceptions.