11:37am UK, Friday March 29, 2002

Children recognise Pokemon 'creatures' more easily than British animals and plants, scientists have found.

A study discovered that the average eight-year-old was better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game than their own native species.

sp pokemon pikachu

Pokemon's Pikachu

They were more likely to remember names like pikachu, metapod, muk and wigglytuff than mouse, otter, beetle and oak tree.

Researchers surveyed a total of 109 children aged four to 11 from two primary schools in Cambridgeshire. Each was asked to identify from picture cards 10 types of British wildlife and 10 Pokemon 'species' drawn randomly from a set of 100.

'Disappointed'

Dr Tim Coulson, from the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University, one of the research team, said: "The reason we decided to do this research is that we were getting the impression that (children's) knowledge of local wildlife wasn't very good. I was more disappointed than surprised."

For wildlife, average success at getting the right answers rose from 32% at age four to 53% at age eight and then fell slightly - but for Pokemon characters, the success rate rose from 7% at four to 78% by eight.

He said it was not possible to tell from the study whether children's knowledge of nature today was the same or worse than it used to be. The findings were published today in the journal Science.

Boys better than girls

Boys tended to score slightly better than girls, but only because girls were less good at identifying Pokemon characters.

Chief researcher Dr Andrew Balmford, from Cambridge University, said: "During their primary years, children apparently learn far more about Pokemon than about their native wildlife and enter secondary school being able to name less than 50% of common wildlife types."