Authentic objects are those that have an historical link to a person, event, time, or place of some significance (e.g., original Picasso painting; gown worn by Princess Diana; your favorite baby blanket). The current study examines everyday beliefs about authentic objects, with three primary goals: to determine the scope of adults' evaluation of authentic objects, to examine such evaluation in two distinct cultural settings, and to determine whether a person's attachment history (i.e., whether or not they owned an attachment object as a child) predicts evaluation of authentic objects. We found that college students in the U.K. (N = 125) and U.S. (N = 119) consistently evaluate a broad range of authentic items as more valuable than matched control (inauthentic) objects, more desirable to keep, and more desirable to touch, though only non-personal authentic items were judged to be more appropriate for display in a museum. These patterns were remarkably similar across the two cultural contexts. Additionally, those who had an attachment object as a child evaluated objects more favorably, and in particular judged authentic objects to be more valuable. Altogether, these results demonstrate broad endorsement of "positive contagion" among college-educated adults. KeywordsOwnership; Authenticity; Essentialism; Cultural comparisons Although the study of human cognition often focuses on analytical, scientific, or rational beliefs (e.g., Piaget, 1970;Shafir & LeBoeuf, 2002), there is increasing realization that magical or superstitious beliefs are also an important part of the fabric of everyday thought. Once thought to be "childish" or reflecting lack of scientific understanding, such beliefs have more recently been shown to be concurrent with scientific understandings (Hood, in press;, even among educated adults. The co-existence of rational and supernatural belief systems can be seen in beliefs about human evolution (Evans, 2008;Shtulman, 2006), illness causation (Legare & Gelman, in press), and moral reasoning (Turiel & Neff, 2000 In the present paper we examine one such set of beliefs -the evaluations of authentic objects. Prior work by Rozin and his colleagues discusses this work in the context of magical contagion beliefs, in which contagion with either a negative or a positive individual will yield negative or positive responses, respectively. For example, people wish to avoid contact with a sweater once worn by a murderer (Nemeroff & Rozin, 1994). Bloom (1996Bloom ( , 2004 also discusses the role of authenticity in judgments of artwork -the evaluation that an authentic piece of art is more valuable than a duplicate. Some work indicates that children, too, grant special status to authentic objects. Children are attentive to the history of an object, judging that personal identity is tied to the historical continuity of an object rather than its perceptual features or name (Gutheil et al., in press) and that original objects are particularly valuable (Frazier & Gelman, 2007). Similarly, the historical featur...

Children who could overcome the gravity error on Hood's (1995) tubes task were tested in a condition where they had to monitor two falling balls. This condition significantly impaired search performance with the majority of mistakes being gravity errors. In a second experiment, the effect of monitoring two balls was compared in the tubes task and a spatial transposition task not involving gravity. Again, monitoring two objects produced impaired search performance in the gravity task but not in the spatial transposition task. These findings support the view that divided attention disrupts the ability to exercise inhibitory control over the gravity error and that the performance drop on this task is not due to the additional task demands incurred by divided attention.

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