Does Watching Anime Make You Smarter? Cartoons, Manga, Subtitles and IQ | Riot IQ
Oct 29, 2026·Advanced Topics & Research
Does Watching Anime Make You Smarter? Cartoons, Manga, Subtitles and IQ
Does watching anime make you smarter? No study shows it raises IQ. Subtitled viewing teaches some words and manga reading is a learned skill, but that is all.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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No study has tested whether watching anime raises IQ, and nothing in the research suggests that it does. The closest experiments, on fast-paced and fantastical cartoons, measured preschoolers' self-control and working memory for a few minutes after viewing, and they found small dips in some studies and none in others; watching subtitled shows can teach a handful of foreign words, and reading manga is a skill that improves with practice.
Anime has a reputation online as the thinking person's cartoon, with lists of series that supposedly only high-IQ viewers understand. This article covers what experiments on cartoons actually measured, what anime can do for learning a language, what researchers have found about reading manga, and why anime fans may look smart for reasons that have nothing to do with the shows.
What happens to children's thinking right after a cartoon?
Almost all of the experimental research on animation and thinking concerns young children and Western cartoons. It measures "executive function," the set of skills used to control attention, hold information in mind and resist impulses. These are cognitive tests, and none of them is an IQ test.
• The SpongeBob study: Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson at the University of Virginia randomly assigned 60 four-year-olds to watch 9 minutes of a fast-paced fantasy cartoon (SpongeBob SquarePants), 9 minutes of a slower, realistic educational cartoon (Caillou), or to draw. Immediately afterward, the children who had watched the fast cartoon did worse on four executive function tasks, including a delay-of-gratification test and the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. The show names come from the university's press release; most of the press coverage focused on the cartoon's pace.
• Fantasy mattered more than speed: In three follow-up experiments with 300 children in total, Lillard and colleagues found that 4- and 6-year-olds scored lower on these tasks after fast, fantastical shows than after a slow, realistic show or play. When pace and fantasy were separated, only the fantastical shows lowered scores, whether they were fast or slow.
• Results that point the other way: Katarzyna Kostyrka-Allchorne and colleagues in the UK tested 187 four-year-olds with specially made videos of an actor reading a story. Unrealistic stories improved the children's response inhibition, regardless of the video's pace.
• A replication in China: Hui Li and colleagues found lower scores on working memory, attention and flexibility tasks in Chinese preschoolers right after an animated show full of fantastical events (90 children in the main experiment).
A 2024 systematic review by Sara Namazi and Saeid Sadeghi gathered 15 such studies with 1,855 children aged 2 to 7. The authors described the results as conflicting overall, with the most consistent pattern being a negative effect of fantasy content on inhibitory control. Every one of these effects was measured within minutes of viewing. None of the studies tested whether the effect lasts, and none measured IQ. The broader question of hours spent in front of a screen belongs to a different body of research, covered in the article on watching TV and IQ.
Can you learn a language from anime?
Anime is one of the main reasons people start learning Japanese. In the Japan Foundation's 2021 worldwide survey of institutions that teach Japanese, 59.9% listed "interest in anime, manga, J-POP, fashion, etc." as a learning objective of their students, a close second to interest in the language itself (60.1%). In North America the figure was 92.1%.
Watching does teach some vocabulary, especially with subtitles.
• Subtitled television: Cees Koolstra and Johannes Beentjes randomly assigned 246 Dutch children in grades 4 and 6 to watch a 15-minute English-language documentary about grizzly bears with Dutch subtitles, the same program without subtitles, or a Dutch program. The subtitled group learned and recognized the most English words.
• A full-length program: Elke Peters and Stuart Webb showed Dutch-speaking learners of English a single full-length TV documentary. Viewers picked up some word meanings without trying, and they learned more of the words that appeared often, that resembled Dutch words, and that they were close to knowing already.
• Fans in the classroom: Natsuki Fukunaga's small qualitative study of college students learning Japanese described how anime fans used the shows to build their language and cultural knowledge outside class.
Learning words in a second language is a real gain, but it is a gain in that language. It is a form of acquired knowledge, close to what psychologists call crystallized intelligence, and it does not imply any change in reasoning ability.
Is reading manga a mental skill?
Manga is the printed side of the same culture, and it turns out to be harder to read than it looks. The cognitive scientist Neil Cohn has reviewed decades of research showing that sequences of drawn panels are not universally understood. Following a story across panels requires a fluency that depends on exposure and practice, much as language does.
• Manga comprehension tests: Since the early 1990s the Japanese psychologist Jun Nakazawa has studied how children and adults understand manga, using a battery known as the Chiba University Comic Comprehension Test. Comprehension improves from childhood into adulthood, and among adults, frequent manga readers recalled and understood more than infrequent readers, regardless of age.
• Japan and the United States: Japanese college students scored higher on the test than American students, which fits the far greater amount of manga reading in Japan. Cohn notes that because the test uses Japanese manga, these results may measure manga comprehension specifically rather than general visual fluency.
• Expert eyes: In one observation reported by Nakazawa, an experienced manga reader moved their eyes smoothly across the panels, while a less experienced reader focused more on the text than on the pictures.
This is classic near transfer: reading manga makes you better at reading manga. Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet's reviews of chess, music and working memory training found that practice improves the trained skill while effects on distant abilities such as general intelligence are close to zero. There is no reason to expect panel reading to behave differently. Manga does involve reading words, and the research on books and verbal ability is covered in the article on reading books and IQ.
Why anime fans can seem smart
The idea that anime fans have high IQs comes from online lists and forum arguments, and I know of no study that has measured the IQs of anime viewers. The claim has no data behind it in either direction.
• Taste and ability: Jason Rentfrow and colleagues studied the entertainment preferences of more than 3,000 people across 108 genres of music, film, books and television. In a community sample of 599 people who took a short reasoning test, higher scores went with liking "aesthetic" genres such as classical music, foreign films and poetry (r = .29) and with disliking light "communal" genres such as soap operas and reality TV (r = −.27). These are modest correlations. Animated films did not load strongly on any one cluster, so the study gives no sign that liking animation tracks reasoning ability.
• Openness and complexity: People who seek out long, intricate, subtitled stories from another culture may score higher on "openness to experience," the personality trait linked to curiosity and aesthetic interests. In Rentfrow's data, openness was the trait most closely tied to liking aesthetic genres. A meta-analysis by Jeromy Anglim and colleagues of more than 160,000 people found that openness correlates about .20 with intelligence, more strongly with crystallized knowledge than with fluid reasoning. Any gap between fans and non-fans would therefore say more about who chooses anime than about what the shows do.
• Age and education: Any comparison between fans and the general public would also need to account for age, schooling and family background before saying anything about the shows themselves.
The pattern is the same one seen with video games and TV, where the people who choose a medium differ from those who do not. The evidence on games, which do have some trial data, is in the article on video games and IQ.
Frequently asked questions
Does watching anime make you smarter?
No study shows that watching anime raises IQ. Subtitled viewing can teach some foreign words, and reading manga builds the skill of reading manga, but neither has been shown to change general intelligence.
Do anime fans have higher IQs?
There is no data on the IQs of anime fans. Any difference would be hard to interpret, because the people drawn to complex, subtitled stories may already differ in curiosity, age and education.
Is anime bad for children's brains?
Some experiments found that young children did worse on self-control and working memory tasks right after watching fast or fantastical cartoons, while others found no effect or the opposite. These were short-term effects measured within minutes, and none of the studies tested anime specifically or measured IQ.
Can you learn Japanese from watching anime?
You can pick up some words and phrases, and studies of subtitled television show that viewers learn vocabulary incidentally. Anime is a strong motivation for learners, but courses and study still do most of the work of learning a language.
Is reading manga as good as reading books?
Reading manga is a skill that improves with practice, and it involves reading text as well as pictures. There is no evidence that it raises IQ, and the research linking reading to verbal ability comes mostly from studies of books.
The takeaway
Watching anime does not make you smarter in the sense of raising IQ, and no study has directly tested it. The cartoon experiments behind most of the headlines measured preschoolers' executive function for a few minutes after viewing, with mixed results. Anime can help motivate language learning, subtitled viewing can teach some words, and manga reading is a genuine learned fluency, but all of these are specific skills. If you want a measure of your reasoning abilities instead of a guess based on your watch list, you can take the RIOT IQ test.
References
1. Lillard, A. S., & Peterson, J. (2011). The immediate impact of different types of television on young children's executive function. Pediatrics, 128(4), 644-649. [doi.org/10.1542/peds.2010-1919](. doi.org
2. Lillard, A. S., Drell, M. B., Richey, E. M., Boguszewski, K., & Smith, E. D. (2015). Further examination of the immediate impact of television on children's executive function. Developmental Psychology, 51(6), 792-805. [doi.org/10.1037/a0039097](. doi.org
3. Kostyrka-Allchorne, K., Cooper, N. R., & Simpson, A. (2019). Disentangling the effects of video pace and story realism on children's attention and response inhibition. Cognitive Development, 49, 94-104. [doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.12.003](. doi.org
4. Li, H., Hsueh, Y., Yu, H., & Kitzmann, K. M. (2020). Viewing fantastical events in animated television shows: Immediate effects on Chinese preschoolers' executive function. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 583174. [doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.583174](. doi.org
5. Namazi, S. A., & Sadeghi, S. (2024). The immediate impacts of TV programs on preschoolers' executive functions and attention: A systematic review. BMC Psychology, 12, 226. [doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01738-1](. doi.org
6. The Japan Foundation. (2023). Survey report on Japanese-language education abroad 2021. The Japan Foundation. [jpf.go.jp](. jpf.go.jp
7. Koolstra, C. M., & Beentjes, J. W. J. (1999). Children's vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language through watching subtitled television programs at home. Educational Technology Research and Development, 47(1), 51-60. [doi.org/10.1007/BF02299476](. doi.org
8. Peters, E., & Webb, S. (2018). Incidental vocabulary acquisition through viewing L2 television and factors that affect learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(3), 551-577. [doi.org/10.1017/S0272263117000407](. doi.org
9. Fukunaga, N. (2006). "Those anime students": Foreign language literacy development through Japanese popular culture. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(3), 206-222. [doi.org/10.1598/JAAL.50.3.5](. doi.org
10. Cohn, N. (2020). Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27(2), 266-285. [doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01670-1](. doi.org
11. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 515-520. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721417712760](. doi.org
12. Rentfrow, P. J., Goldberg, L. R., & Zilca, R. (2011). Listening, watching, and reading: The structure and correlates of entertainment preferences. Journal of Personality, 79(2), 223-258. [doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00662.x](. doi.org
13. Anglim, J., Dunlop, P. D., Wee, S., Horwood, S., Wood, J. K., & Marty, A. (2022). Personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 148(5-6), 301-336. [doi.org/10.1037/bul0000373](. doi.org
14. University of Virginia. (2011, September 12). Fast-paced, fantastical television shows may compromise learning, behavior of young children. ScienceDaily. [sciencedaily.com](. sciencedaily.com
Hero image: Anime and manga bookshop in Japan, by Marek Ślusarczyk (Tupungato), CC BY 3.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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