Exploring the influence of ownership history on object valuation in typical development and autism

She made it with her friend: How social object history influences children's thinking about the value of digital objects

Two studies examine how social object histories from collaborative experiences influenced North American children (N = 160, 5-10 years) thinking about the value of digital objects (48% male/51% female; 51% White/24% Black/11% Asian). With forced-choice judgments, Study 1 found (moderate-large effects) that children viewed digital and physical objects with social histories as more special than objects without such histories. On a 10-point scale, Study 2 found (large effects) that children rated digital objects with positive social histories as more special than objects with negative ones. Overall, the studies found that children's tendencies to use object history to understand object value extends into digital contexts. They also reveal how an unexplored kind of history-social history-affects judgments.

Revisiting the ownership effect in adults with and without autism

Self-owned items are better remembered than other-owned items; this ownership effect reflects privileged processing of self-related information. The size of this ownership effect has been shown to decrease in neurotypical adults as the number of autistic traits increases, and is reduced in autistic adults. However, emerging evidence has questioned the reliability of these findings. This paper aimed to replicate previous work using well-powered, pre-registered designs, and Bayesian analyses. Experiment 1 (N = 100) found a significant ownership effect in neurotypical adults; however, the size of this was unrelated to individual differences in autistic traits. Experiment 2 (N = 56) found an ownership effect in neurotypical but not autistic adults. The findings suggest that individual differences in autistic traits in the neurotypical population do not impact the ownership effect, but a clinical diagnosis of autism might. We discuss how these findings can be explained by differences in psychological self-awareness in autism.

Exploring the Influence of Object Similarity and Desirability on Children's Ownership Identification and Preferences in Autism and Typical Development

This study investigated how ownership identification accuracy and object preferences in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are influenced by visual distinctiveness and relative desirability. Unlike typically developing (TD) children matched on receptive language (M age equivalents: 58.8-59.9 months), children with ASD had difficulty identifying another person's property when object discriminability was low and identifying their own relatively undesirable objects. Children with ASD identified novel objects designated to them with no greater accuracy than objects designated to others, and associating objects with the self did not bias their preferences. We propose that, due to differences in development of the psychological self, ownership does not increase the attentional or preferential salience of objects for children with ASD.

Does Autism Affect Children's Identification of Ownership and Defence of Ownership Rights?

This study investigated how autism spectrum disorder (ASD) impacts children's ability to identify ownership from linguistic cues (proper nouns vs. possessive pronouns) and their awareness of ownership rights. In comparison to typically developing (TD) children matched on receptive language (M age equivalents: 53-56 months), children with ASD were less accurate at tracking owner-object relationships based on possessive pronouns and were less accurate at identifying the property of third parties. We also found that children with ASD were less likely to defend their own and others' ownership rights. We hypothesise that these results may be attributed to differences in representing the self and propose that ASD may be characterised by reduced concern for ownership and associated concepts.