Grasping the concept of personal property

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe concept of property is integral to personal and societal development, yet understanding of the cognitive basis of ownership is limited. Objects are the most basic form of property, so our physical interactions with owned objects may elucidate nuanced aspects of ownership. We gave participants a coffee mug to decorate, use and keep. The experimenter also designed a mug of her own. In Experiment 1, participants performed natural lifting actions with each mug. Participants lifted the Experimenter's mug with greater care, and moved it slightly more towards the Experimenter, while they lifted their own mug more forcefully and drew it closer to their own body. In Experiment 2, participants responded to stimuli presented on the mug handles in a computer-based stimulus-response compatibility task. Overall, participants were faster to respond in trials in which the handles were facing in the same direction as the response location compared to when the handles were facing away. The compatibility effect was abolished, however, for the Experimenter's mug -as if the action system is blind to the potential for action towards another person's property. These findings demonstrate that knowledge of the ownership status of objects influences visuomotor processing in subtle and revealing ways.

So Far So Good: Emotion in the Peripersonal/Extrapersonal Space

“…First, it was the experimenter who was always manipulating the objects. Second, as shown recently [36], property also interacts with our manipulations with objects in the space affecting the proximity of our actions. Finally, the lack of control in the speed at which the experimenter moved the objects towards the participants as well as variable RT to participants' instruction to stop may have also influenced the reaching estimates.…”

“…Likewise, motor actions modulate subsequent affective evaluations of the objects involved [34]; see [35] for a review. In a recent study, Constable, Kritikos and Bayliss [36] demonstrated that other psychological concepts like ownership may also play important roles during object-oriented actions. Finally, egocentric distance estimation seems to be affected by the desirability of objects [37].…”

Creation in judgments about the establishment of ownership

“…Ownership is an important aspect of our representation of objects, and has wide-ranging effects on people's thinking about objects. For example, it affects how accurately objects and their locations are remembered, how they are physically handled, and even how people refer to them (e.g., Constable, Kritikos, & Bayliss, 2011;Coventry, …”

Ownership Status Influences the Degree of Joint Facilitatory Behavior

“…In the case of ownership, self-owned objects enjoy elevated importance with regards to a number of psychological variables including attention (Turk et al, 2011) and memory (Cunningham, Turk, MacDonald & Macrae, 2008). Interestingly, ownership has also been shown to influence physical interactions with objects when individuals act alone: 1) actors reach lower peak accelerations when lifting someone else's object than when they lift their own object; and 2) actors' movements are consistent with a general reticence to interact with other people's objects (Constable, Kritikos, & Bayliss, 2011;Constable, Kritikos, Lipp Running head: OBJECT OWNERSHIP AND FACILITATORY BEHAHAVIOR 4 & Bayliss, 2014). These effects reflect important biases in attachment, preference, and perhaps learned motor programs (see Constable et al, 2014 for a discussion) that alter the manner in which people plan and produce actions toward objects.…”