For adults, ownership is non-obvious: (a) determining ownership depends more on an object’s history than on perceptual cues, and (b) ownership confers special value on an object (“endowment effect”). This study examined these concepts in preschoolers (2.0–4.4) and adults (N=112). Participants saw toy-sets in which one toy was designated as the participant’s, and one as the researcher’s. Toys were then scrambled and participants were asked to identify their toy and the researcher’s toy. By three years of age, participants used object history to determine ownership, and identified even undesirable toys as their own. Furthermore, participants at all ages showed an endowment effect (greater liking of items designated as their own). Thus, even 2-year-olds appreciate the non-obvious basis of ownership.

Adults attach special value to objects that link to notable people or events – authentic objects. We examined children’s monetary evaluation of authentic objects, focusing on four kinds: celebrity possessions (e.g., Harry Potter’s glasses), original creations (e.g., the very first teddy bear), personal possessions (e.g., your grandfather’s baseball glove), and merely old items (e.g., an old chair). Children ages 4–12 years and adults (N= 151) were asked how much people would pay for authentic and control objects. Young children consistently placed greater monetary value on celebrity possessions than original creations, even when adults judged the two kinds of items to be equivalent. These results suggest that contact with a special individual may be the foundation for the value placed on authentic objects.

The goal of the present study was to evaluate the claim that category labels affect children’s judgments of visual similarity. We presented preschool children with discriminable and identical sets of animal pictures and asked them to make perceptual judgments in the presence or absence of labels. Our findings indicate that children who are asked to make perceptual judgments about identical items judge discriminable items less accurately when making subsequent similarity judgments. Thus, labels do not generally affect children’s perceptual similarity judgments; rather, children’s reliance on labels to make similarity judgments appears to be attributable to flaws in the methodological approaches used in prior studies. These results have implications for the role of perceptual and conceptual information in children’s categorization and induction.

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An object's mental representation includes not just visible attributes but also its nonvisible history. The present studies tested whether preschoolers seek subtle indicators of an object's history, such as a mark acquired during its handling. Five studies with 169 children 3-5 years of age and 97 college students found that children (like adults) searched for concealed traces of object history, invisible traces of object history, and the absence of traces of object history, to successfully identify an owned object. Controls demonstrated that children (like adults) appropriately limit their search for hidden indicators when an owned object is visibly distinct. Altogether, these results demonstrate that concealed and invisible indicators of history are an important component of preschool children's object concepts.