Ownership and object history

Appropriate behavior in relation to an object often requires judging whether it is owned and, if so, by whom. The authors propose accounts of how people make these judgments. Our central claim is that both judgments often involve making inferences about object history. In judging whether objects are owned, people may assume that artifacts (e.g., chairs) are owned and that natural objects (e.g., pinecones) are not. However, people may override these assumptions by inferring the history of intentional acts made in relation to objects. In judging who owns an object, people may often consider which person likely possessed the object in the past--such reasoning may be responsible for people's bias to assume that the first person known to possess an object is its owner.     

What counts as by? Young children's use of relative distance to judge nearbyness

The authors investigated how 3- and 4-year-old children and adults use relative distance to judge nearbyness. Participants judged whether several blocks were by a landmark. The absolute and relative distance of the blocks from the landmark varied. In Experiment 1, judgments of nearbyness decreased as the distance from the landmark increased, particularly for 4-year-olds and adults. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds and adults were more likely to judge objects at an intermediate distance as by the landmark when intervening objects were absent than when intervening objects were present. In Experiment 3, participants of all ages were more likely to judge objects at a short distance as by the landmark when intervening objects were absent. Reliance on relative distance to judge nearbyness becomes more systematic and applicable to larger spatial extents across development.     

Abraham Lincoln and Harry Potter: Children’s differentiation between historical and fantasy characters

Based on the testimony of others, children learn about a variety of figures that they never meet. We ask when and how they are able to differentiate between the historical figures that they learn about (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) and fantasy characters (e.g., Harry Potter). Experiment 1 showed that both younger (3- and 4-year-olds) and older children (5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds) understand the status of familiar figures, correctly judging historical figures to be real and fictional figures to be pretend. However, when presented with information about novel figures embedded in either a realistic narrative or a narrative with obvious fantasy elements, only older children used the narrative to make an appropriate assessment of the status of the protagonist. In Experiment 2, 3-, and 4-year-olds were prompted to judge whether the story events were really possible or not. Those who did so accurately were able to deploy that judgment to correctly assess the status of the protagonist.     

Early understanding of age- and environment-related noxiousness in biological kinds: Evidence for a naive theory

Four experiments evaluated whether children have a naive theory in which biological kinds, specifically foods, are distinguished by potential for decomposition. In the first two experiments, 4- through 6-year-olds judged that natural changes such as aging make biological natural kinds (BNK; e.g., apple) noxious, but do not have a comparable effect on nonbiological natural kinds (e.g., rock) or artifacts. In Experiment 3, few children were able to articulate specific biological mechanisms responsible for perceptible signs of noxiousness. But most children in Experiment 4 exhibited the more general understanding that the processes by which BNK become noxious are irreversible. In sum, young children seem to have a domain-specific theory of biological kinds, although they are unaware of the exact mechanisms operative in the domain. Children may thus develop a theory that picks out a domain of objects before the causal principles organizing this domain are fully understood.     

Young children's use of functional information to categorize artifacts: three factors that matter

Three experiments addressed factors that might influence whether or not young children take into account function, as opposed to overall appearance or shape, when they extend the names of novel artifacts. Experiment 1 showed that 4-year-olds more often extend a name on the basis of a demonstrated function when that function provides a plausible causal account of perceptible object structure. Experiment 2 showed that they more often extend a name by function when they respond slowly, and hence thoughtfully. Experiment 3 demonstrated that they are more likely to take function into account when they extend names than when they judge similarities. Comparisons of lexical and non-lexical conditions in younger children failed to show any differences. Overall, the findings suggest that by 4 years of age, children may learn names as labels for novel artifact kinds rather than perceptual classes, and that the processes by which they categorize may be mindful and reflective, as in adults.     

Children's reasoning about physics within and across ontological kinds

Reasoning about seven physics principles within and across ontological kinds was examined among 188 5- and 7-year-olds and 59 adults. Individuals in all age groups tended to appropriately generalize what they learned across ontological kinds. However, children also showed sensitivity to ontological kind in their projections: when learning principles with reference to people they were more likely to assume that the principles apply to another person than to an inanimate object, and when learning with reference to an inanimate object they were more likely to assume that the principles apply to another inanimate object than to a person. Five-year-olds, but not 7-year-olds, projected concepts learned about people to a greater extent than principles learned about inanimate objects, closely paralleling the findings of Carey for the biological domain (Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Results from a separate sample of 22 5-year-olds suggest that the primary findings cannot be explained by response perseveration. The present findings indicate that children understand physics principles that apply to both animate and inanimate objects, but distinguish between these ontological kinds.     

A New Look at Gaze: Preschool Children's Understanding of Eye-Direction

This study challenges the consensus view that children can judge what someone is looking at from infancy. In the first experiment 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children were asked to judge what a person in a drawing was looking at and which of two people was “looking at” them. Only 6% of 2-year-olds and young 3-year-olds passed both gaze-direction tasks, but over 70% passed an analogous point-direction task. Most older 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds passed all three tasks. Experiment 2 compared children's ability to judge what the experimenter was looking at with performance on the picture tasks. Three-year-olds performed significantly worse than 4-year-olds on the real life and picture gaze tasks. Performances on the two types of gaze task were highly correlated. Experiment 3 included stimuli with the additional cue of head-direction. Even the younger children performed well on these stimuli. These results suggest that, regardless of task format, children cannot judge what someone is looking at from eye-direction alone until the age of 3 years. Weaknesses in the evidence supporting the consensus view are highlighted and discussed.     

Children's understandings of the attributes of life

Previous investigations of children's understandings of the life concept have focused on their classifications of the life status of familiar objects. In this study, we attempted to examine more directly the processes by which children infer life status by examining their reasoning about unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, 4- to 11-year-olds and adults were asked to name attributes of living things to establish which attributes they associated most closely with life. Children age 7 and younger most often named attributes true only of animals but not of plants; older children more often named attributes true of both animals and plants. However, movement was the single attribute cited most frequently by children of all ages tested. In Experiment 2, 4- to 11-year-olds and adults were presented information about attributes of imaginary objects on a distant planet and were asked to infer if those objects were alive. Again, young children relied relatively heavily on qualities true only of animals but not of plants, whereas older children relied more on attributes true of both plants and animals. Also as before, movement was viewed as indicative of life at all ages tested. In Experiment 3, we examined the hypothesis that children discriminate among different types of motion and that the types of motion they associate with life are in fact typical of living things. Children ranging from age 5 through 11 were found to discriminate among different types of motion and to infer that objects were alive only when they showed the types of motion typical of living beings. The results of Experiment 3 allowed interpretation of seemingly conflicting results that have arisen in previous studies, as well as in Experiments 1 and 2 of the present study.     

Children and Adults Use Gender and Age Stereotypes in Ownership Judgments

In everyday life, we are often faced with the problem of judging who owns an object. The current experiments show that children and adults base ownership judgments on group stereotypes, which relate kinds of people to kinds of objects. Moreover, the experiments show that reliance on stereotypes can override another means by which people make ownership judgments—inferring ownership from first possession. Experiment 1 replicates previous findings in showing that children and adults are strongly biased to assume that the first person to possess an object is its owner, while also demonstrating that the first-possession bias shows specificity to ownership. Experiment 2 shows that preschoolers and adults used gender stereotypes to make ownership judgments, and they do this even when stereotypes conflict with first possession. Experiment 3 reports similar findings but with age stereotypes. These findings reveal that stereotypes are a powerful means for making ownership judgments.     

What do children want to know about animals and artifacts? Domain-specific requests for information

Children's questions may reveal a great deal about the characteristics of objects they consider to be conceptually important. Thirty-two preschool children were given opportunities to ask questions about unfamiliar artifacts and animals. The children asked ambiguous questions such as "What is it?" about artifacts and animals alike. However, they were more likely to ask about the functions of artifacts, but about category membership, food choices, and typical locations of animals. They never asked questions about either artifacts or animals that would be considered inappropriate by adults. The results indicate that children hold different expectations about the types of information important for categorizing living and artifact kinds. Young children conceive of artifacts in terms of functions, but conceive of animals in terms of biologically appropriate characteristics. Such results speak to debates about the role of function in children's biological reasoning and to accounts of children's artifact concepts.     

Determining who owns what: do children infer ownership from first possession?

A basic problem of daily life is determining who owns what. One way that people may solve this problem is by relying on a ‘first possession’ heuristic, according to which the first person who possesses an object is its owner, even if others subsequently possess the object. We investigated preschoolers’ use of this heuristic in five experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, 3- and 4-year-olds inferred that an object was owned by the character who possessed it first, even though another character subsequently possessed it. Two-year-olds also showed this bias, but only when the object was placed between the characters when children were asked about ownership. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that children’s bias to select the first possessor results from a tendency to select the character first associated with the object. Experiment 4 showed that 3- and 4-year-olds have difficulty disregarding the first possession heuristic, even when provided with evidence that the character who first possessed an object is not its owner. But Experiment 5 found that children can disregard the heuristic in at least some situations. These five experiments suggest that the first possession heuristic guides children’s ownership inferences. The findings provide the first evidence that preschoolers can infer who owns what, when not explicitly told, and when not reasoning about objects with which they are personally acquainted.     

Children's reliance on creator's intent in extending names for artifacts

When children learn a name for a novel artifact, they tend to extend the name to other artifacts that share the same shape—a phenomenon known as the shape bias. The present studies investigated an intentional account of this bias. In Study 1, 3-year-olds were shown two objects of the same shape, and were given an explanation for why the objects were the same shape even though they were intended to be different kinds. The shape bias disappeared in children provided with this explanation. In Study2, 3-year-olds were shown triads of objects, and were either given no information about the function of a named target object, told the function that object could fulfill, or told the functions all three objects were intended to fulfill. Only in the third condition did children overcome a shape bias in favor of a function bias when extending the name of the target object. These findings indicate that 3-year-olds' shape bias results from intuitions about what artifacts were intended to be.     

A developmental dissociation between category and function judgments about novel artifacts

Two studies investigated the relative importance of information about intended design and current use on judgments about the function (Experiment 1) or category (Experiment 2) of novel artifacts in preschool children and adults. Adults assigned function and name on the basis of information about design across all conditions, while children’s decisions about function dissociated from decisions about category. Function judgments (in both 4 and 6-year-olds) were neutral between design and current use, both when the current use was idiosyncratic (e.g. performed by just one agent) and conventional (performed by many people; Experiment 1). By contrast, where category judgments were required for the very same objects (Experiment 2), children named according to design intentions - but only if the alternate function was idiosyncratic. Judging function and assigning category are thus cognitive tasks that draw on different information across development, a fact that should be captured by theories of developing artifact concept structure.     

When children ask, "What is it?" what do they want to know about artifacts?

When children ask, "What is it?" are they seeking information about what something is called or what kind of thing it is? To find out, we gave 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (32 at each age) the opportunity to inquire about unfamiliar artifacts. An ambiguous question was answered with a name or with functional information, depending on the group to which the children were assigned. Children were inclined to follow up with additional questions about the object when they had been told its name, but seemed satisfied with the answer when they had been told the object's function. Moreover, children in the name condition tended to substitute questions about function for ambiguous questions over the course of the session. These results indicate that children are motivated to discover what kinds of things novel artifacts are, and that young children, like adults, conceive of artifact kinds in terms of their functions.     

Social transmission of disinhibition in young children

The present study examined whether young children's behaviors in the Dimensional Change Card Sorting task can be influenced by their observation of another person performing the task. Experiment 1 showed that after children watched an adult sorting cards according to one rule, although the children were instructed to sort the cards according to a new rule, most 3-year-olds made perseverative errors and used the observed, old rule to sort the cards instead of the new rule. However, only some 4-year-olds and few 5-year-olds made the same mistake. Experiments 2, 3 and 4 showed that the younger children took into consideration social pragmatic information displayed by the adult model when deciding to use the old rule or the new rule. When the model appeared to know that she sorted the cards incorrectly (Experiments 2 and 3), or was uncertain whether she sorted cards correctly (Experiment 4), most 3-year-olds no longer committed perseverative errors. When the adult model was confident about her sorting or oblivious to her sorting errors, most 3-year-olds made perseverative errors. These results taken together suggest that social observation can lead to disinhibitions. In other words, disinhibition can be transmitted socially from one person to another.     

Two-year-olds use artist intention to understand drawings

Adults appreciate that an abstract visual representation can be understood through inferring the artist's intention. Many investigators have argued that this capacity is a late-emerging developmental accomplishment, a claim supported by findings that preschool children ignore explicit statements about intent when naming pictures. Using a simplified method, we explored picture naming in 2-year-olds. Experiment 1 found that when an adult artist drew an object, children later mapped a novel name for the drawing to the object that the adult had been looking at. Experiment 2 suggests that this response was not merely because there was more attention given to that object. These findings are consistent with the view that children are naturally disposed to reason about artifacts, including artwork, in terms of inferred intention.     

Children in Asian cultures say yes to yes-no questions: Common and cultural differences between Vietnamese and Japanese children

We investigated whether children's response tendency toward yes-no questions concerning objects is a common phenomenon regardless of languages and cultures. Vietnamese and Japanese 2- to 5-year-old (N = 108) were investigated. We also examined whether familiarity with the questioning issue has any effect on Asian children's yes bias. As the result, Asian children showed a yes bias to yes-no questions. The children's response tendency changes dramatically with their age: Vietnamese and Japanese 2- and 3-year-olds showed a yes bias, but 5-year-olds did not. However, Asian 4-year-olds also showed a yes bias only in the familiar condition. Also, Asian children showed a stronger yes bias in the familiar condition than the unfamiliar condition. These two findings in Asian children were different from the previous finding investigated North American children (Fritzley & Lee, 2003). Moreover, there was a within-Asian cross-cultural difference. Japanese children showed different response tendencies, which were rarely observed in Vietnamese children. Japanese 2-year-olds and some 3-year-olds showed a "no answer" response: they tended not to respond to an interviewer's questions. Japanese 4- and 5-year-olds also showed an "I don't know" response when they were asked about unfamiliar objects. Japanese children tended to avoid a binary decision. We discussed the cross-cultural differences.     

Diversity-Based Reasoning in Children

One of the hallmarks of inductive reasoning by adults is the diversity effect, namely that people draw stronger inferences from a diverse set of evidence than from a more homogenous set of evidence. However, past developmental work has not found consistent diversity effects with children age 9 and younger. We report robust sensitivity to diversity in children as young as 5, using everyday stimuli such as pictures of objects with people. Experiment 1 showed the basic diversity effect in 5- to 9-year-olds. Experiment 2 showed that, like adults, children restrict their use of diversity information when making inferences about remote categories. Experiment 3 used other stimulus sets to overcome an alternate explanation in terms of sample size rather than diversity effects. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that children more readily draw on diversity when reasoning about objects and their relations with people than when reasoning about objects' internal, hidden properties, thus partially explaining the negative findings of previous work. Relations to cross-cultural work and models of induction are discussed.     

The role of representational status and item complexity in parent–child conversations about pictures and objects

Mother–child conversations about pictures systematically differ from mother–child conversations about objects: Pictures are more likely than objects to elicit talk about kinds, whereas objects are more likely than pictures to elicit talk about individuals. The purpose of the current study is to examine whether this difference between pictures and objects is explained by differences in item complexity. Mothers and their 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: simple or complex. In each condition, participants viewed 12 toy objects and 12 pictures, matched for content. The items were either highly detailed (complex condition) or very plain (simple condition). Replicating previous research, mothers and children provided relatively more focus on kinds when talking about pictures, and relatively more focus on individuals when talking about objects. The current results go further, however, to demonstrate that this effect is independent of the items’ complexity. We therefore propose that the picture–object difference is not due to low-level differences in amount of perceptual detail provided, but rather is due to the greater ease with which pictures serve as representations [DeLoache, J. S. (1991). Symbolic functioning in very young children: Understanding of pictures and models. Child Development, 62, 736–752]. These data indicate the ways in which a fundamental conceptual distinction between kinds and individuals arises in different linguistic expressions and in different contexts.