Developmental differences in fright responses to a television program depicting a character transformation

While being exposed to a sequence from a television program depicting a visual transformation of character (The Incredible Hulk), children aged 3 to 5 years experienced more fear after the transformation than before it, whereas 9 to 11-year-olds experienced more fear before the transformation than during and after it. The different patterns of fear had been predicted on the basis of differences in cognitive development, that is, on younger subjects' greater perceptual boundedness and their failure to understand transformations.