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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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From ancient objects in museums to souvenirs obtained on vacation, we often value objects for their distinctive histories. The present experiments investigate the developmental origins of people's feelings that objects with distinctive histories are special. In each of four experiments, 4-to 7-year-olds (total N = 400) saw pairs of identical-looking objects in which one object was new and the other had a history that was either distinctive or mundane. In the first experiment, the histories did not involve people; in the remaining experiments, the histories were personal and related the objects to particular people. Distinctive histories affected children's valuations of regular objects (all experiments), but not their valuations of stuffed animals. Both older and younger children viewed regular objects with distinctive histories as more special than those with mundane histories. Older children mostly viewed objects with distinctive histories as more special than new objects, and younger children showed similar judgments when judging which object a person cared about more. Together, the findings reveal a novel way that information about the past influences children's judgments about the present, and suggest that young children's valuations of objects depend on objects' histories. DISTINCTIVE HISTORIES 3 Children Value Objects With Distinctive Histories Consider a vase from ancient Greece, the very first bicycle, and a seashell you brought home from your last vacation. These objects differ in many ways, but your regard for each likely depends on its past. The vase is from an interesting time and place, and the first bicycle has an important historical role. Adults value such objects over similar-looking objects without distinctive histories. For example, adults judge such objects are worth a lot of money and belong in museums, and they express an interest in owning and touching such objects (e.g., Frazier,

Ownership and value go together, and understanding both is imperative for children to know how to act in socially appropriate and advantageous ways. This paper reviews how children come to think about ownership and value. We first review how children consider history, labor, and control when inferring whether objects are owned and to whom they belong. We then review how children conceive of ownership rights and how they use ownership to anticipate other people's actions, feelings, and knowledge. With value, we first touch on children's attention to physical features and norms. We then discuss how ownership impacts children's valuations of objects, stemming both from children's own status as owners and from their knowledge of previous ownership. We also review how various kinds of distinctive histories affect children's valuations. Finally, we review children's understanding of how value depends on the market forces of supply and demand.

In three experiments, we investigated whether 2-3-year-olds (N = 240) consider ownership when taking resources for themselves and allocating resources to another agent. When selecting resources for themselves, children generally avoided taking resources that belonged to another agent, and instead favored their own resources (Experiments 1 and 2). However, they did not avoid taking the agent's resources when the only other resources available were described as not belonging to the agent (Experiment 3). Children also selected fewer of the agents' resources when taking for themselves than when giving to the agent (Experiments 2 and 3). In giving to the agent, children were more likely to select the agent's resources than resources not belonging to the agent (Experiment 3). These findings show that ownership affects how 2-and 3-year-olds allocate resources. The findings also provide new evidence that 2-year-olds may respect others' ownership rights, at least to a limited degree, though we also consider an alternative explanation for the findings.