A world of my own: The emergence of ownership effects in childhood. Sheila J. Cunningham Project funded by the European Research Council UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

Ownership Owned objects are a unique class of stimuli. Incorporated into self-concept. As a result, ownership elicits cognitive biases, such as memory enhancement. (Cunningham et al., 2008)

Why a memory effect? Possible explanations: – from SRE literature: conscious evaluation – from ownership imaging studies: automatic responses to self-cues If a large body of self-knowledge is not necessary, might ownership effects emerge early in childhood?

Children’s self-referencing It is not clear when self-reference effects emerge in childhood. Developmental research has focused on standard SRE paradigm. Findings: – Pullyblank et al. (1982): 7 years. – Halpin et al. (1984) and Ray et al. (2009): strengthens between 7 and 10 years.

Children’s self-referencing Task unsuitable for children, especially with reliance on abstract knowledge. To examine impact of self-systems in young children, need different paradigms. Should exploit children’s concrete processing.

Ownership in childhood Ownership provides a good assessment tool: – Young children show understanding of ownership, and attachment to objects. – Young children are more likely to use owned objects to define themselves.

Ownership in childhood Children have a large extant object knowledge framework. Current research: Can use ownership as a means of testing whether young children have self- referential processing biases.

Ownership Experiment 64 children (aged 4-6) were tested in pairs. Children take turns to sort picture cards into self-owned and other- owned baskets. Children then separated and given surprise recognition memory test.

Results Children’s scores transformed into A’ to control for age-related decrease in false alarm rate. A’ = 0.5+((H−FA)(1+H−FA))/4H(1−FA)

Results Analysis: single factor (Owner: self or other) repeated-measures ANCOVA, with age (in months) included as a covariate. Findings: – Main effect of Owner (F (1,58) = 6.72, p <.05). – Age was a significant covariate ( F (1,58) = 4.40, p <.05 ). The impact of ownership decreased with age (r = -.27, p <.05).

Children can show self-referential processing advantages, if appropriate paradigm is used. Mechanisms supporting enhanced encoding: – stored self-knowledge? – enhanced attention and affective arousal? Why reduction in effect with age? – decreasing egocentricity. – decreasing use of objects to define self. Conclusions

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