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People's emotions often depend on ownership. We report 3 experiments showing that preschoolers and toddlers consider ownership in predicting basic emotions. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds were sensitive to ownership when predicting how a character would feel when objects went missing. Experiment 2 found that 3- to 5-year-olds consider ownership when predicting emotional reactions to harmless violations of ownership rights, and Experiment 3 showed 2-year-olds also do this. For instance, preschoolers and toddlers predicted a girl would be upset when a boy played with her teddy bear without permission, but not when he played with his own. These findings show that preschoolers and toddlers understand basic causal relations between ownership and emotions, and are also the first to show that 2-year-olds are sensitive to other people's ownership rights.

Three experiments show that young children (N = 384) use ownership to predict actions but not to infer preferences. In Experiment 1, 3- to 6-year-olds considered ownership when predicting actions but did not expect it to trump preferences. In Experiment 2, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, used ownership to predict actions, and 5-year-olds grasped that an agent would use his or her own property despite preferring someone else's. This experiment also showed that relating an agent to an object interfered with 3- and 4-year-olds' judgments that a more attractive object is preferred. Finally, Experiment 3 found that 3- and 4-year-olds do not believe that owning an object increases regard for it. These findings are informative about the kinds of information children use to predict actions and the inferences they make from ownership. The findings also reveal specificity in how children use ownership to make judgments about others, and suggest that children more closely relate ownership to people's actions than to their desires.

Do children use objects to infer the people and actions that created them? We ask how children judge whether designs were socially transmitted (copied), asking if children use a simple perceptual heuristic (more similar = more likely copied), or make a rational, flexible inference (Bayesian inverse planning). We found evidence that children use inverse planning to reason about artifacts’ designs: When children saw two identical designs, they did not always infer copying occurred. Instead, similarity was weaker evidence of copying when an alternative explanation ‘explained away’ the similarity. Thus, children inferred copying had occurred less often when designs were efficient (Exp1, age 7-9; N=52), and when there was a constraint that limited the number of possible designs (Exp2, age 4-5; N=160). When thinking about artifacts, young children go beyond perceptual features and use a process like inverse planning to reason about the generative processes involved in design.

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