Personalised stories and the self-reference effect: what the evidence shows

Background: what personalisation is and why it might work

A personalised story puts the child into the material: their name, their likeness, their interests, their real places and people. Interest in personalised products, especially children's books, is growing (Kucirkova et al., 2017). Kucirkova's analysis of the 100 most popular children's literacy apps and digital books proposed a simple way to describe them: what is personalised, how it happens and who does the personalising (Kucirkova, 2018). She has also warned that apps which personalise content automatically can sideline children's own agency (Kucirkova, 2019).

Three bodies of research suggest why personalisation might help. The first is the self-reference effect: people remember information better when they link it to themselves. The second is context personalisation in education: learning tasks framed around a learner's own life or interests. The third is modelling: children learn by watching others, and how similar the model seems may matter. Video self-modelling, in which a child watches themselves succeed, is the most personal case. All three bear on personalised preparation stories and cartoons for hard moments, where the hope is that a child who sees "someone like me" manage will feel able to manage too.

How the research has been done

Memory experiments. Adult studies usually ask people to judge words in relation to themselves or someone else and then test memory. Young children cannot do that task, so developmental researchers use concrete versions: sorting toy pictures into "mine" and "yours" (the ownership paradigm), pairing objects with a photo of the child or of another child, or having the child perform actions. A surprise memory test usually follows within minutes.

Personalised book studies often use within-child designs: the same child hears a book with personalised and non-personalised sections, and learning or talk is compared between them. Samples are small, typically 18 to 35 preschoolers.

Context personalisation trials randomly assign pupils to standard problems or matched problems rewritten around their own details or interests, often in computer tutoring. Outcomes are accuracy, speed, test scores and interest.

Video self-modelling research mostly uses single-case experimental designs with one to a few children, summarised in reviews with overlap statistics (see our methods glossary).

What the studies found

The self-reference effect, from adults to preschoolers

A meta-analysis confirmed that relating material to oneself improves memory compared with both meaning-based and other-person encoding. The advantage was smaller when the comparison was another person, and the authors attributed it to the self being a rich, well-organised concept that supports elaboration (Symons & Johnson, 1997).

The effect appears early. In seven experiments with 3- and 4-year-olds, children remembered actions they had performed themselves, items processed alongside their own image and objects they owned better than matched material linked to others (Ross et al., 2011). Sixty-four children aged 4 to 6 who sorted toy pictures into their own and another child's sets later recognised their "own" toys better; the advantage shrank with age and was not explained by verbal ability or theory of mind (Cunningham et al., 2013). Across three studies with 4- to 6-year-olds, objects paired with the child's own photo were better remembered, both in recognition and in recalling which photo they went with (Cunningham et al., 2014). In 138 children aged 4 to 6, the child's own face also helped them bind objects to their context, which the authors explained by the own face capturing attention (Andrews et al., 2020).

There are limits. Three-year-olds retained more new words for objects they were told were theirs immediately afterwards, but four hours later and the next morning the self advantage was no longer significant (Axelsson et al., 2018). In older children, deeper "evaluative" self-processing gives an extra boost, although at ages 8 to 11 this boost is still smaller than in adults (Hutchison et al., 2021).

In learning tasks. Children aged 7 to 9 who learned spellings by writing sentences about themselves wrote longer sentences and spelled more than 20% more accurately than children writing about someone else, and a second experiment with real words replicated the pattern (Turk et al., 2015). In 71 children aged 7 to 9, seeing their own name in a working memory task increased how many items they could hold, by as much as it did for adults (Ahmed et al., 2025).

In autism. Autistic children show the self-reference effect in ownership tasks, but its size varies: children with more severe autism showed less self-bias (Gillespie-Smith et al., 2018). Among 21 autistic preschoolers, a larger effect went with better parent-rated social functioning, and children with stronger autistic traits showed no memory advantage for self-linked information (Ford & McLean, 2024).

Personalised books

The best-known experiment read 18 preschoolers (average age 3 years 10 months) a book with personalised and non-personalised sections, each containing unfamiliar real words. A week after the first reading, and again after the second, children knew more about the words from the personalised sections (Kucirkova et al., 2014a). A companion study of 35 children around 3 years old compared what children said spontaneously during the personalised and non-personalised parts of a book; a research digest reported that children talked more during the personalised story and that much of this talk referred to themselves (Kucirkova et al., 2014b). In a study of 26 mothers reading with their 3- to 4-year-olds from a digital book that included the child's name, photo, favourite toy and favourite food, the authors concluded that the personalised features mattered, and highlighted the parent's role in widening the conversation beyond the child's focus on themselves (Kucirkova et al., 2021).

Personalisation does not automatically change behaviour. When preschoolers heard a sharing story personalised with their name, a matched non-personalised sharing story or a control story, the personalised version did not improve understanding of the story or increase sharing, although both sharing stories produced more detailed retellings than the control (Kruse et al., 2021). According to the research group's summary of a toddler study, children learned a sequencing task from a media character personalised for them, but not from a non-personalised one (Calvert et al., 2014). Kucirkova and Littleton's "distance model" proposes that what matters is how close the content comes to the child's own life and identity, not the name alone (Kucirkova & Littleton, 2020).

Personalising schoolwork to the child's life and interests

Education research has tested personalisation for decades, mostly in maths. In a randomised study with fifth and sixth graders learning to divide fractions by computer, problems that used details from each child's own life, gathered by questionnaire, produced higher test scores than the same problems with concrete or abstract details; the US What Works Clearinghouse rated the study as meeting its standards (Anand & Ross, 1987). With primary pupils learning arithmetic rules, presenting the material in an appealing context, personalising it and offering small choices all increased motivation, engagement and learning (Cordova & Lepper, 1996). In secondary school, 145 algebra students given problems about their own interests, such as sport or music, solved them faster and more accurately, with the biggest gains for students who had been struggling and an advantage that persisted on later standard problems (Walkington, 2013). A follow-up with 150 students linked the effect partly to heightened interest in the task (Bernacki & Walkington, 2018).

A 2024 meta-analysis of 34 publications found medium positive effects of personalising materials to learners' interests on interest (g = 0.55, 26 effect sizes), retention (g = 0.48, 46 effect sizes) and transfer (g = 0.36, but only 6 effect sizes). Retention effects were larger in quasi-experiments than in randomised experiments, which suggests that better-controlled studies find smaller retention gains (Lin et al., 2024). Note that these studies personalise around a learner's interests and details rather than making the learner the hero of a story.

Video self-modelling and model similarity

Video self-modelling (VSM) is the most personal form of modelling: the child watches edited footage of themselves performing the target behaviour successfully (see our review of video modelling). A review of school-based research found 18 studies that met strict criteria and concluded that VSM improved targeted skills and behaviour, with evidence of generalisation and maintenance (Hitchcock et al., 2003). A meta-analysis of 14 single-case studies reported an overall improvement rate difference (IRD) of 0.73 (95% CI 0.69 to 0.78). IRD is the difference between the proportion of improved data points during intervention and during baseline, so higher is better. Effects were strongest for autistic participants and for behaviour, and weak for academic skills (Mason et al., 2016). An earlier meta-analysis found both video modelling with other people and VSM effective for autistic children and adolescents (Bellini & Akullian, 2007).

Is seeing yourself better than seeing someone else? Direct comparisons are tiny and disagree. Five autistic children aged 4 to 11 learned conversation answers equally well from self and other models (Sherer et al., 2001), whereas three autistic children learning letters all reached mastery with self-modelling but only one did with a peer model (Marcus & Wilder, 2009).

A classic review of peer modelling concluded that similarity between model and child can help, but does not automatically do so (Schunk, 1987). One kind of similarity stands out. Children with maths difficulties who watched a "coping" model, who struggled at first and improved gradually, gained more self-efficacy and skill than those who watched a model who got everything right straight away, and they judged the coping model as more like themselves (Schunk et al., 1987). In adults, watching a photo-realistic virtual version of oneself exercise led to more exercise afterwards than watching a virtual other person; the virtual selves were built from participants' photographs, and all participants were university students (Fox & Bailenson, 2009).

Risks of personalisation

Privacy. Personalised products depend on children's personal data, such as names and photographs. A UCL working paper noted that publishers become custodians of this data and that small data points can be combined into profiles, and proposed data accounts controlled by families (Kucirkova et al., 2017). In the UK, the Information Commissioner's statutory children's code asks online services to treat children's best interests as a primary consideration, collect only the data they need, not share it without a compelling reason and switch profiling off by default (Information Commissioner’s Office, 2020).

Memory. Seeing a vivid version of yourself do something can change what you remember. In a study of 55 preschool and primary-age children, the older children who watched an immersive simulation of themselves doing something new, or who imagined it, later reported more false memories of it than children in a neutral condition; preschoolers formed false memories at similar rates in every condition (Segovia & Bailenson, 2009).

Self-focus. Personalisation can pull attention towards the self, which is why the shared-reading researchers stressed the adult's role in widening the talk (Kucirkova et al., 2021).

For whom and under what conditions

• Age. Self-reference effects appear by age 3 to 4 (Ross et al., 2011). The ownership advantage shrank between 4 and 6 (Cunningham et al., 2013), while richer self-reflection develops through middle childhood (Hutchison et al., 2021).
• Autism. The effect is present in many autistic children but weaker in those with more severe autism (Gillespie-Smith et al., 2018). Video self-modelling effects were strongest for autistic participants (Mason et al., 2016).
• Struggling learners gained most from interest-based personalisation in algebra (Walkington, 2013).
• Depth of personalisation. Swapping in a name may do little for behaviour (Kruse et al., 2021); tasks in which children actively relate the content to themselves show clearer gains (Turk et al., 2015).
• Durability. Some memory advantages fade within hours (Axelsson et al., 2018).

What this means in practice

• Make it relevant, not just named. The child's real classroom door, real hairdresser and real people probably matter more than a name on the cover.
• Show coping, not perfection. A character who is a little worried and then manages is closer to the coping models that worked best.
• Get the child to think about themselves. Ask “What will you do when you get to the door?” In learning studies, children who actively related material to themselves learned more.
• Then widen the talk. Ask how the teacher or a friend might feel.
• Frame it as a rehearsal. Say “this is a story about how it could go”, especially with younger children.
• Share as little data as needed. Ask any provider what they collect, how long they keep photos and who can see them, and avoid posting personalised videos publicly.

What this means for personalised cartoons

A personalised cartoon, such as Cala Luna's personalised social cartoons, combines several of these ingredients: the child's name, a cartoon likeness, their real setting and people, and a character who copes with one hard moment. Each ingredient has some support on its own. Self-reference helps attention and memory, relevance to the child's life helps interest and learning, and coping models raise children's confidence. That makes the approach research-based. It does not make it tested, and nobody has trialled Cala Luna's cartoons.

The key untested step is the cartoon likeness. Video self-modelling uses real footage of the child. The adult virtual-self studies used photo-realistic heads (Fox & Bailenson, 2009), and self-reference studies with children used their own photos, names or possessions. We found no study testing whether a stylised cartoon, let alone a cartoon animal, is processed as "me" in the way a photo is. The closest example is two case reports of toddlers whose parents read them AI-generated picture books showing the child, the real dentist and the real procedure before a first dental visit. Parents reported less worry and good cooperation, but with two children and no comparison this shows only that the idea is feasible (Ishitani et al., 2026). Whether animal characters teach as well as human ones is itself unsettled; see our review of cartoons versus real people.

Risks to design around. Photos used to make a likeness are personal data and should be kept to a minimum and deleted when no longer needed (Information Commissioner’s Office, 2020). Because vivid self-images can shape memory in school-age children (Segovia & Bailenson, 2009), a cartoon about a future event is best presented as a rehearsal, not a record. And because similarity works best when the model copes rather than performs perfectly (Schunk et al., 1987), a personalised character who is calm from the start may be less useful than one who feels the worry and manages it.

Limits of the evidence

• Most self-reference studies with children are laboratory memory tests over minutes, not changes in behaviour in real situations.
• Personalised book studies are small (18 to 35 children), mostly with 3- to 4-year-olds, and measure words and talk rather than coping.
• The context personalisation trials described here are mostly maths with school-age pupils, and in the meta-analysis experimental studies showed smaller retention effects than quasi-experiments (Lin et al., 2024).
• Video self-modelling evidence is mostly single-case, with very few direct comparisons against other models.
• We found no independent evaluations of commercial personalised books or videos.

Open questions for research

1. Does a stylised cartoon likeness of a child produce a self-reference effect comparable to the child's photo? The ownership and self-image tasks used with 4- to 6-year-olds could be repeated with avatars of varying realism.
2. Does an animal avatar, for example a lynx with the child's hair colour and clothes, count as "me" for children aged 5 to 9?
3. Which part of personalisation does the work: the likeness, the name, or the real setting and people? A factorial trial could vary each separately.
4. In a randomised trial, does a personalised cartoon change children's observed behaviour and reported worry at the real moment more than a well-made generic cartoon of the same situation?
5. Does watching a personalised cartoon of an event that has not yet happened change children's later memory of what actually happened?
6. Do effects differ between autistic children with stronger and weaker self-reference effects?
7. Can personalisation that uses little or no personal data, such as a parent's description instead of photos, deliver the same benefits?

Frequently asked questions

References

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Spotted an error, or know a study we should add? Email hello@calalunakids.com. Every study we draw on is in the research library; research terms are explained in our methods glossary.