Using versus liking: Young children use ownership to predict actions but not to infer preferences

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.

Rat Hindlimb Cryopreservation and Transplantation: A Step Toward "Organ Banking"

In 2016, over 5 million reconstructive procedures were performed in the United States. The recent successes of clinical vascularized composite allotransplantations, hand and face transplantations included, established the tremendous potential of these life-enhancing reconstructions. Nevertheless, due to limited availability and lifelong immunosuppression, application is limited. Long-term banking of composite transplants may increase the availability of esthetically compatible parts with partial or complete HLA matching, reducing the risk of rejection and the immunosuppressive burden. The study purpose was to develop efficient protocols for the cryopreservation and transplantation of a complete rodent limb. Directional freezing is a method in which a sample is cooled at a constant-velocity linear temperature gradient, enabling precise control of the process and ice crystal formation. Vitrification is an alternative cryopreservation method in which the sample solidifies without the formation of ice crystals. Testing both methods on a rat hindlimb composite tissue transplantation model, we found reliable, reproducible, and stable ways to preserve composite tissue. We believe that with further research and development, cryopreservation may lead to composite tissue "banks." This may lead to a paradigm shift from few and far apart emergent surgeries to wide-scale, well-planned, and better-controlled elective surgeries.

Accent, Language, and Race: 4-6-Year-Old Children's Inferences Differ by Speaker Cue

Three experiments examined 4- to 6-year-olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), 4- to 5-year-olds used a speaker's foreign accent to infer that they currently live far away, but 6-year-olds did not. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born. In both experiments, race played some role in children's geographic inferences. Finally, in Experiment 3 (N = 48), 6-year-olds used language to infer both where a speaker was born and where they currently live. These findings reveal critical differences across development in the ways that speaker characteristics are used as inferential cues to a speaker's geographic location and history.

Knowledge Central: A Central Role for Knowledge Attributions in Social Evaluations

Five experiments ( N = 1710) demonstrate the central role of knowledge attributions in social evaluations. In Experiments 1–3, we manipulated whether an agent believes, is certain of, or knows a true proposition and asked people to rate whether the agent should perform a variety of actions. We found that knowledge, more so than belief or certainty, leads people to judge that the agent should act. In Experiments 4–5, we investigated whether attributions of knowledge or certainty can explain an important finding on how people act based on statistical evidence, known as “the Wells effect”. We found that knowledge attributions, but not certainty attributions, mediate this effect on decision making.

Fitting the Message to the Listener: Children Selectively Mention General and Specific Facts

In three experiments, two hundred and ninety-seven 4- to 6-year-olds were asked to describe objects to a listener, and their answers were coded for the presence of general and specific facts. In Experiments 1 and 2, the listener's knowledge of the kinds of objects was manipulated. This affected references to specific facts at all ages, but only affected references to general facts in children aged 5 and older. In Experiment 3, children's goal in communicating was either pedagogical or not. Pedagogy influenced references to general information from age 4, but not references to specific information. These findings are informative about how children vary general and specific information in conversation, and suggest that listeners' knowledge and children's pedagogical goals influenced children's responses via different mechanisms.

Children's judgments about ownership rights and body rights: Evidence for a common basis

We report two experiments supporting the theory that children's understanding of ownership rights is related to their notions of body rights. Experiment 1 investigated 4- to 7-year-olds' (N=123) developing sensitivity to physical contact in their judgments about the acceptability of behaving in relation to owned objects and body parts. Experiment 2 used a simpler design to investigate this in 3- and 4-year-olds (N=112). Findings confirmed two predictions of the theory. First, in both experiments, children's judgments about ownership and body rights were similarly affected by physical contact. Second, judgments about both kinds of rights were yoked in development; age-related changes in judgments about ownership rights were paralleled by changes in judgments about body rights. Our findings have additional import for theories of ownership rights because they suggest that physical contact may be a crucial factor in whether behaviors targeting property are judged to be permissible.

Young children infer preferences from a single action, but not if it is constrained

Inferring others' preferences is socially important and useful. We investigated whether children infer preferences from the minimal information provided by an agent's single action, and whether they avoid inferring preference when the action is constrained. In three experiments, children saw vignettes in which an agent took a worse toy instead of a better one. Experiment 1 shows that this single action influences how young children infer preferences. Children aged three and four were more likely to infer the agent preferred the worse toy when the agent took this toy, compared with when the agent did not take either toy. Experiment 2 then shows that children consider constraints when inferring preferences from a single action. From age 5, children were less likely to avoid inferring a preference for the worse toy when the agent's action was physically constrained. Finally, Experiment 3 provides evidence that children's and adults' sensitivity to constraints, when inferring preferences, is not based on a general notion of constraints, and instead depends on several specific notions. Whereas 5-6-year-olds in this experiment considered physical and socio-moral constraints when inferring preferences, they had difficulty grasping the relevance of epistemic constraints. Adults considered physical and epistemic constraints, but were not influenced by the socio-moral constraint of ownership. Together these findings contribute to a picture of cognitive development in which children are able to infer non-obvious properties on the basis of minimal concrete information, and are also sensitive to subtle changes in this information.

Children's generic interpretation of pretense

We report two experiments investigating how 3- to 5-year-olds learn general knowledge from pretend play-how they learn about kinds of things (e.g., information about dogs) from information about particular individuals in pretend play (a certain dog in a pretend scenario). Children watched pretend-play enactments in which animals showed certain behaviors or heard utterances conveying the same information. When children were subsequently asked about who shows the behavior, children who watched pretend play were more likely to give generic responses than were children who heard the utterances. These findings show that children generalize information from pretend play to kinds even without being prompted to think about kinds, that pretend play can be informative about familiar kinds, and also that pretend play is a more potent source for general knowledge than are utterances about individuals.

Mechanisms of Belief-Desire Reasoning

Biases in reasoning can provide insight into underlying processing mechanisms. We demonstrate a new bias in children's belief-desire reasoning. Children between 4 and 8 years of age were told a story in which a character was mistaken about which of three boxes contained some object. The character wanted to go to one of the boxes, but only if it did not contain the object. In this scenario, the character would be expected to avoid the box where she falsely believed the object to be, but might go to either of the remaining boxes. Though the character was equally likely to go to either box, children were biased to predict that the character would go to the box that contained the object. In a control task, the character had the same desire but did not have a false belief; in this case, children showed no bias, choosing the two correct answers equally often. The observed pattern of bias was predicted by a developmental model of belief-desire reasoning. Competent belief-desire reasoning depends on a process of selection by inhibition in which the best belief content emerges from a set of candidates.

"Because It's Hers": When Preschoolers Use Ownership in Their Explanations

Young children show competence in reasoning about how ownership affects object use. In the present experiments, we investigate how influential ownership is for young children by examining their explanations. In three experiments, we asked 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 323) to explain why it was acceptable (Experiments 1-3) or unacceptable (Experiment 2 and 3) for a person to use an object. In Experiments 1 and 2, older preschoolers referenced ownership more than alternative considerations when explaining why it was acceptable or unacceptable for a person to use an object, even though ownership was not mentioned to them. In Experiment 3, ownership was mentioned to children. Here, younger preschoolers frequently referenced ownership when explaining unacceptability of using an object, but not when explaining why using it was acceptable. These findings suggest that ownership is influential in preschoolers' explanations about the acceptability of using objects, but that the scope of its influence increases with age.

If I am free, you can't own me: Autonomy makes entities less ownable

Although people own myriad objects, land, and even ideas, it is currently illegal to own other humans. This reluctance to view people as property raises interesting questions about our conceptions of people and about our conceptions of ownership. We suggest that one factor contributing to this reluctance is that humans are normally considered to be autonomous, and autonomy is incompatible with being owned by someone else. To investigate whether autonomy impacts judgments of ownership, participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk read vignettes where a person paid for an entity (Experiments 1 and 3) or created it (Experiment 2). Participants were less likely to judge that the entity was owned when it was described as autonomous compared with when it was described as non-autonomous, and this pattern held regardless of whether the entity was a human or an alien (Experiments 1 and 3), a robot (Experiments 2 and 3), or a human-like biological creation (Experiment 2). The effect of autonomy was specific to judgments of whether entities were owned, and it did not influence judgments of the moral acceptability of paying for and keeping entities (Experiment 3). These experiments also found that judgments of ownership were separately impacted by ontological type, with participants less likely to judge that humans are owned compared with other kinds of entities. A fourth experiment tested a further prediction of the autonomy account, and showed that participants are more likely to view a person as owned if he willingly sells himself. Together these findings show that attributions of autonomy constrain judgments of what can be owned.

Where are you from? Preschoolers infer background from accent

For adults, accent is an obvious indicator of a speaker's geographical background. The current study investigated whether preschoolers are sensitive to the relationship between background and accent. Experiment 1 shows that 3- to 5-year-olds believe that two speakers who share the same accent live in the same place but do not share the same personal preferences. Experiment 2 demonstrates that 4- and 5-year-olds believe that two speakers with the same accent share cultural norms associated with a particular place, but that two speakers with different accents have different cultural norms. As in Experiment 1, children did not think that personal preferences were related to accent. These findings show early awareness of the relationship between accent and geographical background.

NOX1-induced accumulation of reactive oxygen species in abdominal fat-derived mesenchymal stromal cells impinges on long-term proliferation

Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) are multipotent and can be derived from different adult tissues including fat. Our repeated attempts to produce long-term proliferative cultures of rat abdominal adipose stem cells (aASCs) under normal oxygen concentration (21%) were unsuccessful. We set to examine the events controlling this cytostasis of aASCs and found that it resulted from overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that led to apoptosis. ROS overproduction in aASCs was accompanied by increased expression of NOX1 but not of NOX2 or NOX4. NOX family members are an important source of intracellular ROS pointing to NOX1 involvement in ROS accumulation. This was verified when aASCs that were grown under 3% oxygen conditions expanded long term, displaying reduced NOX1 expression and decreased ROS accumulation. NOX1 involvement in aASC cytostasis was reaffirmed when cells that were expanded under normoxic conditions in the presence of a specific NOX1 inhibitor, ML171, demonstrated reduced ROS accumulation, reduced apoptosis and long-term expansion. aASC expansion arrest was accompanied also by a weak fat differentiation and migratory potential, which was enhanced by NOX1 inhibition. This suggests an inhibitory role for NOX1-induced ROS overproduction on aASCs, their fat differentiation and migratory potential. In contrast to aASCs, similar cells produced from subcutaneous fat were easily expanded in normoxic cultures, exhibiting low ROS concentrations, a low number of apoptotic cells and improved fat differentiation and migration. Taken together, our results show, for the first time, that NOX1-induced ROS accumulation halts ASC expansion and reduces their differentiation and migratory potential under normoxic conditions. Importantly, this phenotype comprises a tissue-specific signature as it was evident in aASCs but not in subcutaneous ASCs. NOX-induced ROS accumulation and cytokine production by fat are part of the metabolic syndrome. The similarity of this phenomenon to aASC phenotype may indicate that they arise from similar molecular mechanisms.

Rule-based category use in preschool children

We report two experiments suggesting that development of rule use in children can be predicted by applying metrics of complexity from studies of rule-based category learning in adults. In Experiment 1, 124 3- to 5-year-olds completed three new rule-use tasks. The tasks featured similar instructions but varied in the complexity of the rule structures that could be abstracted from the instructions. This measure of complexity predicted children's difficulty with the tasks. Children also completed a version of the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sorting task. Although this task featured quite different instructions from those in our "complex" task, performance on these two tasks was correlated, as predicted by the rule-based category approach. Experiment 2 predicted findings of the relative difficulty of the three new tasks in 36 5-year-olds and also showed that response times varied with rule structure complexity. Together, these findings suggest that children's rule use depends on processes also involved in rule-based category learning. The findings likewise suggest that the development of rule use during childhood is protracted, and the findings bolster claims that some of children's difficulty in rule use stems from limits in their ability to represent complex rule structures.

Preschoolers and toddlers use ownership to predict basic emotions

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.

Mine, yours, no one's: children's understanding of how ownership affects object use

Two experiments examined children's understanding of how ownership affects object use. In Experiment 1, 84 children age 4-6 were asked what a person was allowed to do with a human-made object that either belonged to the person or belonged to someone else. In Experiment 2, 44 children age 4-5 were asked what a person was allowed to do with a natural object that belonged to the person, belonged to someone else, or belonged to no one. Children were permitted to provide as many responses as they wished. Children's responses reflected an appreciation that ownership affects a wide range of object uses, including harmless object use. Children's responses also reflected an appreciation that owner's rights should be upheld regardless of whether the owner's identity is known, or whether the owner is nearby. Moreover, children's responses suggest that they view ownership as restricting nonowners from using property, rather than affecting use by entitling owners.