Getting into the minds of story characters is not a difficult task for kids, for a new study has revealed that preschoolers can get immersed in the life of a character, especially a character's thoughts and feelings.

In the psychological study, the University of Waterloo researchers focussed on how well kids comprehend stories instead of how well they tell them.

"Children around the ages of three to five are fairly limited in their verbal abilities, and many previous studies have relied on methods requiring children to tell a story orally, potentially underestimating what they can do," said lead researcher Daniela O'Neill, who did the study with graduate student Rebecca Shultis.

O'Neill, an associate professor of developmental psychology and head of the UW centre for child studies, said that's why the study introduced an innovative approach to look at children's storytelling ability. It offers a new method to evaluate storytelling ability that can pick up differences in the abilities of the younger children.

"I believe children as young as age three to five are developing in important ways with respect to their narrative ability, we just need new ways to look at it,” O’Neill said.

"In essence, rather than looking at how children are able to tell stories, it looked at how children understand stories, and whether, like adults, children build up a 'mental model' of the story. By this, I mean, are children, like adults, able to build up a model of the story in their mind and 'step into the mind,' so to speak, of a character.”