Early understanding of ownership helps infants efficiently organize objects in memory

Abstract

Knowing who owns what is challenging because it is often invisible to direct perception. Yet, the concept of ownership can be instrumental for organizing representations of the world. Here we investigated whether 16-month-olds (N = 64) can already use ownership to mentally organize a scene, binding representations of individual objects into higher order sets to overcome working memory limits. We found that infants failed to remember four identical objects when a single social agent possessed all four (Experiment 1). However, when two distinct agents possessed two identical objects each, infants successfully remembered all four by chunking them into two sets of two (Experiments 2 and 3). Infants were not merely using the agents as perceptual landmarks; they failed to chunk when two objects each were placed in front of distinctive inanimate objects (Experiment 4). Together, these results suggest that infants can harness abstract knowledge of personal ownership to organize the contents of memory.