Title: The cognitive development of ownership
Description: Children must learn the rules and norms concerning private property early in life in order to avoid conflict and build relationships with peers. Yet throughout preschool and into elementary school children fight over toys, resist giving gifts and often must be instructed to share (Dawe, 1934; Ramsey, 1987). In this thesis, I use a cognitive developmental approach to investigate children's understanding of ownership. In three experimental studies, I examined (a) children's ability to recognize when ownership exists and (b) children's ability to respect property once the owner is known. A key goal of this research was to see if these abilities are influenced by the manner in which children learn who owns which objects: either from direct observation of visual cues (such as possession) or via verbal communication (i.e., testimony).

Study 1 examined the ability of 24- and 30-month-olds to acquire ownership information through testimony. The results revealed that, by 30 months of age, children can learn who owns objects using language alone, without the need to see the objects when the information is acquired. Twenty-four-month-olds can learn about ownership via testimony in certain circumstances when the toys are visible. Study 2 assessed how preschoolers resolve conflicting cues of ownership, specifically, verbal statements of ownership versus a visual cue of possession. This set of experiments show that 2- and 3-year-olds struggle to identify the owners of toys when these cues are in conflict. Four- and 5-year-olds accept testimony as a more reliable cue to ownership. Study 3, a pilot study, began an investigation into 3- and 4-year-olds's ability to respect an owned object based on verbal and visual cues to ownership. The youngest children tested in this study avoided the owned object when it was identified as owned using verbal statements, but not when ownership cues were provided visually, by having the object possessed and used by another person. These preliminary results suggest that children may not process visual cues such as possession as reliable indicators of ownership. The results of these studies are considered in light of other developmental research and the implications for education.
Subjects: Cognition in children, Social aspects, Developmental psychology