Table 1.

Summary of book features' impact on learning and transfer in each learning domain.

Book feature	Word and letter learning	Biology	Physics	Problem solving	Moral learning
Pictorial Realism: Transfer from photographs was easiest for infants, transfer from cartoons most difficult. With symbolic development, children get better at transferring from perceptually dissimilar depictions to real objects, so should get better at transferring from all kinds of pictures.	Ganea et al., 2008; Mareovich and Peralta, 2015	No studies	No studies	Simcock and DeLoache, 2006	No studies
Manipulatives: Features that distract from or obscure the basic correspondence between pictures and their referent appear to decrease learning in the word and letter learning and biological domains. With development of both symbolic and analogical reasoning skills, children should get better at overcoming this distraction.	Tare et al., 2010; Chiong and DeLoache, 2012	Tare et al., 2010	No studies	No studies	No studies
Fantastical Contexts: Young children have a tendency to err on the side of rejecting fantastical information, making transfer of information presented in fantastical contexts less likely. In addition, children need analogical reasoning skills to recognize contexts for application, which may be difficult because fantastical contexts necessarily differ from real-world contexts. Fantastical contexts appear to be most disruptive in the biological and problems solving domains and less disruptive in physical science, possibly because children are more willing to accept violations of reality in that domain.	Weisberg et al., 2015 (did not asses transfer)	Walker et al., 2014	Ganea et al., 2017	Richert et al., 2009; Richert and Smith, 2011	No studies
Anthropomorphism: Stories without anthropomorphism more clearly resemble reality, which may support the symbolic insight and analogical reasoning needed for children to recognize that information is relevant and should be transferred from one context to another. The ability to distinguish fantasy from reality may also support children in appropriately extracting information from anthropomorphic stories to be transferred.	No studies	Ganea et al., 2014; Waxman et al., 2014; Geerdts et al., 2015	No studies	No studies	Larsen et al., 2017
Genre: There is some evidence that the generic language used in information books could support children in identifying information that is intended to transfer, however the one study that directly compares learning and transfer of information from different genres found no effect. Development of symbolic and analogical reasoning skills may support children in identifying information to transfer regardless of the language used.	No studies	No studies	Venkadasalam and Ganea, 2017	No studies	No studies