Imagination, Effects of Television on

The question of whether and how television viewing impacts children's imagination has been debated since the medium became part of everyday life, and there is still no consensus on this issue. On the one hand, television viewing is believed to produce a passive intellect and to reduce imaginative capacities. On the other hand, there has been enthusiasm about educational television viewing fostering children's imaginative skills. This entry reviews the existing research on television's effects on children's imagination and evaluates four hypotheses on the impact of television on imagination that have been proposed in the literature.

Researchers have advanced contradictory opinions about the influence of television on imaginative play and creativity. Some authors believe that television stimulates play and creativity. Many others, however, argue that television hinders imaginative play and creativity. A stimulation hypothesis and three important reduction hypotheses are discussed following.

Before reviewing the literature, it is necessary to define two aspects of children's imagination that have been addressed in earlier studies: imaginative play and creativity. In imaginative play, children pretend that they are someone else, that an object represents something else, or that they are in a different place and time. Creativity is children's capacity to generate many novel or unusual ideas, for example, in drawings or stories.

Children's imaginative play is usually measured by observing children when they are playing, either alone or with other children. Children's creativity is measured in different ways. Experimental studies often use measures related to the media to which children are exposed. For example, children are asked to invent problem solutions, to make up a story, or to make a drawing based on the stimulus medium. Correlational studies have often used divergent thinking tests as a measure of creativity. A divergent thinking test requires that the child come up with as many solutions as possible to some open-ended problem. An example of such a problem is, “How many uses can you think of for a shoe?” and “Just suppose you hung on the clouds; what would happen?”