Person Perception and Children's Impressions of Television and Real Peers

Much television programming depicts people engaged in social interaction. Children's understandings of television, therefore, may be guided by their abilities to make sense of character depictions. By examining the developmental characteristics of impressions, this study suggests that the same construal process shapes children's understandings of both television and real peers. The study also indicates that impressions of both television and real peers are based on a common set of perceptual dimensions. Moreover, children's impressions are shown to be a function both of characteristics of the target and of the common underlying construal system.