Study On Children's Attention Preference And Identification For Cartoon Characters

The research focused on attention preference and identification which place important impacts on children by using a serials of cartoon staffs. Taking children from kindergarten and primary students from grade one to grade three as research participants; we intended to describe the characteristic of their attention preference and identification when watching TV. The research will be helpful to make out TV's influence on children and give some useful information to media workers' and educational researchers' practical work. In all, it is a creative research.This study was divided into four chapters as follows.The first chapter was the preface. It reviewed former research results, including the origin of media research, research of the media influence on children development and television attention as well as identification. In the end of the research, the definition, dimensions of identification and the whole research assumptions were proposed.The second chapter was the research of children's attention preference to cartoon characters which used a newly eye movement application tobii as tool and included primary students of grade one to grade three. The statistic analysis took two eye movement parameters, that is, gaze time and fixation count, and included the following five aspects: sex and grades of participants, different kinds of cartoon, different gender of cartoon characters, leading actor and minor roles. The results showed that boys and girls like cartoon characters with the same gender as themselves, participants of different grades like different gender of cartoon characters, eye movement parameters of different cartoons were different. There were no difference of participant's eye movement parameters between leading actor and minor roles, whereas there was positive correlation between fixation counts of leading actor and minor roles.The third chapter was related to children's identification of cartoon characters. Participants were kindergarten students and primary students from grade one to three. By asking questions of identification, researchers intended to find out the relationship among identification and its six dimensions and gender, grades of participants, kinds of cartoon, gender of cartoon characters. The analysis results showed that among five kinds of cartoon, children were more likely to identify magic cartoon. Children behaved different in various dimensions of identification. Children understanded magic cartoon more easily and were more likely to imitate magic cartoon characters. Children liked magic, lovely and funny cartoon characters much more. Boys and girls had significant difference in identification; boys identified male characters more whereas girls identified female ones more. Participants from different grades behaved different in dimensions of identification. Primary students of grade 3 had got the highest score in the self-lost dimension; senior kindergarten students had got the highest score in the goal-achieve dimension, whereas middle kindergarten students were more likely to imitate behaviors and word of characters. Moreover, there was no correlation between attention preference and identification.In the last chapter, both theoretical and practical implications were elaborated and the research limitations and future directions were discussed.