Children's sensitivity to authenticity in their extension of brand names

Abstract

Learning about the countless manufactured resources that surround us involves learning that they may be categorized according to the identity of their maker (i.e., their brand). Prior work indicates that children know some brand names as young as two years but has not examined whether young children understand that these expressions should be extended only to authentic products (i.e., those with a historical link to a particular maker) regardless of their perceptual appearance (i.e., the presence of a familiar trademark). Thirty-two 4-year-olds, 32 6-year-olds and 32 adults participated. Adults and 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, systematically extended familiar brand names from a target product to other products that shared the same maker, even when this extension could not be based on perceptual appearance. By six years, children have begun to understand that a non-obvious historical property – maker identity – underlies the categorization of manufactured objects by brand.