Fictional stories are often used to teach new information to children. But it is not yet clear how the unrealistic elements that are so common in these stories, particularly anthropomorphism, might affect their learning. Existing research has arrived at contradictory results, with anthropomorphism sometimes helping and sometimes hindering children's learning. To clarify this issue, the current study investigates the effect of varying which characters are anthropomorphized: the story's narrators or the targets of the story's educational material. Children in the United States (N = 143 3- to 7-year-olds) heard one of the four stories, in which either human or kangaroo narrators taught new animal facts and a biological principle (i.e., trait inheritance). Additionally, the animals in the story were depicted either realistically or anthropomorphically. There were no differences across conditions in children's learning of the principle, implying that anthropomorphic depictions neither help nor hinder this kind of learning. But children who saw human narrators learned animal facts significantly better than children who saw kangaroo narrators. These results suggest that anthropomorphism may not have consistent effects on learning, highlighting the need for more fine-grained investigations of how anthropomorphism impacts children's learning from educational media.
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