Banerjee Konika, Kominsky Jonathan F, Fernando Madhawee, Keil Frank C
Department of Psychology.
Dev Psychol. 2015 Dec;51(12):1791-801. doi: 10.1037/a0039751. Epub 2015 Sep 28.
Across 3 experiments, we found evidence that information about who owns an artifact influenced 5- to 10-year-old children's and adults' judgments about that artifact's primary function. Children's and adults' use of ownership information was underpinned by their inference that owners are typically familiar with owned artifacts and are therefore likely to know their primary functions. Accordingly, when this inference was undermined-when an artifact's owner was said to be unfamiliar with the owned artifact-ownership was no longer used as a privileged heuristic cue to artifact function. These experiments also revealed age-related differences in how ownership information was prioritized relative to another well-studied source of information known to influence artifact cognition, namely, information about an artifact's original designer-intended function. Specifically, older children and adults were more likely than younger children to prioritize design information over ownership information. Our results suggest that children and adults differ in how they weight the relative importance of these 2 sources of function-relevant information-likely reflecting age-related changes in children's and adults' sensitivity to ownership and design information across development. (PsycINFO Database Record
在3项实验中，我们发现有证据表明，关于某一人工制品所有者的信息会影响5至10岁儿童和成年人对该人工制品主要功能的判断。儿童和成年人对所有权信息的使用，是基于他们的推断，即所有者通常熟悉所拥有的人工制品，因此很可能知道其主要功能。相应地，当这种推断被削弱时——当某一人工制品的所有者被说成不熟悉所拥有的人工制品时——所有权就不再被用作推断人工制品功能的优先启发式线索。这些实验还揭示了在如何将所有权信息相对于另一个已知会影响人工制品认知的、经过充分研究的信息来源（即关于人工制品原始设计者预期功能的信息）进行优先排序方面，存在与年龄相关的差异。具体而言，年龄较大的儿童和成年人比年龄较小的儿童更有可能将设计信息置于所有权信息之上。我们的研究结果表明，儿童和成年人在如何权衡这两种与功能相关的信息来源的相对重要性方面存在差异——这可能反映了儿童和成年人在整个发育过程中对所有权和设计信息的敏感度与年龄相关的变化。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》 ）
