Possession is not always the law: With age, preschoolers increasingly use verbal information to identify who owns what

Preschoolers Selectively Infer History When Explaining Outcomes: Evidence From Explanations of Ownership, Liking, and Use

“…For example, preschoolers said that the boy found the rock when explaining why he owns it. These findings conflict with claims that preschoolers' reasoning about ownership is primarily based on simple cues, such as physical associations between an object and a person, and verbal testimony (Blake & Harris, 2011; also see Blake, Ganea, & Harris, 2012). In contrast to these claims, we found that 4-and 5-year-olds explained ownership by inferring past events, which they neither witnessed nor were told.…”

Late Emergence of the First Possession Heuristic: Evidence From a Small‐Scale Culture

“…One possibility for the divergent results is that previous studies used narratives in addition to visual stimuli, which may have provided subtle (nonperceptual) cues to ownership. Recent findings that 4-year-olds readily override physical cues when ownership is explicitly stated (Blake et al, 2012) offer tentative support for this suggestion.…”

“…One of the ownership rules that has received particular attention is the first possession heuristic. Specifically, young Western children will attribute ownership to a person that possessed an object first (Friedman & Neary, 2008), unless they receive conflicting verbal ownership information (Blake, Ganea, & Harris, 2012). However, children do not just rely on first possession, but also seem to use it as a cue to reconstruct the historical path of possession (Friedman, van de Vondervoort, Defeyter, & Neary, 2013;Nancekivell & Friedman, 2014).…”

Young Children's Understanding of Ownership

“…In some studies, children give less weight to possession as an ownership cue than certain competing sources of information. For example, when possession is pitted against testimony about ownership, 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds base ownership judgments on testimony, suggesting that they view testimony as the more definitive source of information (Blake et al., ; Neary & Friedman, in press, Experiment 2B). Likewise, first possession is trumped by strong age and gender stereotypes, and by information about an object's history (Friedman et al., ; Malcolm et al., in press).…”

“…Yet he may still know they belong to her based on her verbal testimony-perhaps she told him that the garden tools belong to her. At age 2, and perhaps younger, children use verbal testimony to learn who owns what (e.g., Blake, Ganea, & Harris, 2012;Gelman et al, 2012; also see Saylor, Ganea, & Vasquez, 2011).…”