Ori Friedman

..Like other mental states, pretense eludes purely behavioral description. The metarepresentational theory does not suffer these problems and provides a better account of children's pretense...

..The psychological basis of ownership is a neglected area of research; the authors consider twenty-one disparate reasons why it is worth investigating...

..In judging who owns an object, people may often consider which person likely possessed the object in the past--such reasoning may be responsible for people's bias to assume that the first person known to possess an object is its owner...

..The findings provide the first evidence that preschoolers can infer who owns what, when not explicitly told, and when not reasoning about objects with which they are personally acquainted...

..Together, these findings provide evidence for an assumption that specifically guides our reasoning about ownership and that may lead everyday intuitions about property to be generally consistent with property law...

..Again, most children predicted that the girl would succeed. These findings suggest that children do not follow the rule "ignorance means you get it wrong."..

..We argue that this is readily explained by the metarepresentational theory, but harder to explain if children are behaviorists about pretense...

..The findings support the "necessary for possession" account and suggest that people's judgments about ownership likely depend on counterfactual reasoning or on processes akin to those used to make judgments about causality...

..Younger 3-year-olds chose between the characters at chance. These findings indicate that preschoolers infer ownership from control of permission...

..These findings suggest that preschoolers predict behavior based on avoidance desires by inhibiting the target to be avoided, as well as that the inhibition lingers, reducing the target's accessibility for subsequent predictions...

..In contrast to claims that children think about natural kinds as being similar to artifacts, the current findings reveal that children have differing expectations about whether they are owned...

..Predicting behavior in light of the character's desire to avoid the object added more difficulty in the false belief task. This finding is consistent with the Selection Processing model, but not with the General Difficulty account...

..By modeling the ToMM-SP as mechanisms of selective attention, we have uncovered new empirical phenomena. We propose that early "theory of mind" is a modular-heuristic process of domain-specific learning...