Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Cues of control modulate the ascription of object ownership

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Psychological Research Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Knowing whether an object is owned and by whom is essential to avoid costly conflicts. We hypothesize that everyday interactions around objects are influenced by a minimal sense of object ownership grounded on respect of possession. In particular, we hypothesize that tracking object ownership can be influenced by any cue that predicts the establishment of individual physical control over objects. To test this hypothesis we used an indirect method to determine whether visual cues of physical control like spatial proximity to an object, temporal priority in seeing it, and touching it influence this minimal sense of object ownership. In Experiment 1 participants were shown a neutral object located on a table, in the reaching space of one of two characters. In Experiment 2 one character was the first to find the object then another character appeared and saw the object. In Experiments 3 and 4, spatial proximity, temporal priority, and touch are pitted against each other to assess their relative weight. After having seen the scenes, participants were required to judge the sensibility of sentences in which ownership of the object was ascribed to one of the two characters. Responses were faster when the objects were located in the reaching space of the character to whom ownership was ascribed in the sentence and when ownership was ascribed to the character who was the first to find the object. When contrasting the relevant cues, results indicate that touch is stronger than temporal priority in modulating the ascription of object ownership. However, all these effects were also influenced by contextual social cues like the gender of both characters and participants, the presence of a third-party observer, and the co-presence of characters. Consistently with our hypothesis, results indicate that many different cues of physical control influence the ascription of ownership in daily social contexts.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Aglioti, S., Smania, N., Manfredi, M., & Berlucchi, G. (1996). Disownership of left hand and objects related to it in a patient with right brain damage. Neuro Report, 8, 293–296.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anelli, F., Borghi, A. M., & Nicoletti, R. (2012). Grasping the pain: motor resonance with dangerous affordances. Consciousness and Cognition, 21, 1627–1639.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–609.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Barsalou, L. W. (2003). Abstraction in perceptual symbol systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences, 358, 1177–1187.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Beggan, J. K., & Brown, E. M. (1994). Association as a psychological justification for ownership. Journal of Psychology, 128, 365–380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blake, P. R., Ganea, P. A., & Harris, P. L. (2012). Possession is not always the law: with age, preschoolers increasingly use verbal information to identify who owns what. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 113, 259–272.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Borghi, A. M., Binkofski, F., Cimatti, F., Scorolli, C., & Tummolini, L. (2017). The challenge of abstract concepts. Psychological Bulletin, 143(3), 263–292.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Borghi, A., & Scorolli, C. (2009). Language comprehension and dominant hand motion simulation. Human Movement Science, 28(1), 1–27.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Botvinik, M. (2004). Probing the neural basis of body ownership. Science, 305, 782–783.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brosnan, S. F. (2011). Property in nonhuman primates. In H. Ross & O. Friedman (Eds.), Origins of ownership of property. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 132, 9–22.

  • Bruzzo, A., Borghi, A. M., & Ghirlanda, S. (2008). Hand-object interaction in perspective. Neuroscience Letters, 441, 61–65.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Calvo-Merino, B., Glaser, D. E., Grèzes, J., Passingham, R. E., & Haggard, P. (2005). Action observation and acquired motor skills: an FMRI study with expert dancers. Cerebral Cortex, 15(8), 1243–1249.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Calvo-Merino, B., Grèzes, J., Glaser, D. E., Passingham, R. E., & Haggard, P. (2006). Seeing or doing? Influence of visual and motor familiarity in action observation. Current Biology, 16(22), 2277.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Constable, M. D., Kritikos, A., & Bayliss, A. P. (2011). Grasping the concept of personal property. Cognition, 119(3), 430–437.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Constable, M. D., Kritikos, A., Lipp, O. V., & Bayliss, A. P. (2014). Object ownership and action: the influence of social context and choice on the physical manipulation of personal property. Experimental Brain Research, 232, 3749–3761. doi:10.1007/s00221-014-4163.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Coventry, K. R., Griffiths, D., & Hamilton, C. (2014). Spatial demonstratives and perceptual space: describing and remembering object location. Cognitive Psychology, 69, 46–70.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • DeScioli, P., & Karpoff, R. (2015). People’s judgments about classic property law cases. Human Nature, 26, 184–209.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Elgesem, D. (1997). The modal logic of agency. Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2(2), 1–46.

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein, R. A. (1979). Possession as the root of title. Georgia Law Review, 13, 1221–1243.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ericson, K. M., & Andreas, F. (2014). The Endowment Effect. Annual Review of Economics, 6, 555–579.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eswaran, M., & Neary, H. M. (2014). An Economic Theory of the Evolutionary Emergence of Property Rights. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 6, 203–226.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, O. (2008). First possession: an assumption guiding inferences about who owns what. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 290–295.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, O. (2010). Necessary for possession: how people reason about the acquisition of ownership. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1161–1169.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, O., Neary, K. R., Defeyter, M. A., & Malcolm, S. L. (2011). Ownership and object history. New direction for child and adolescent development, 132, 79–89. doi:10.1002/cd.298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, O., & Ross, H. (2011). Twenty-one reasons to care about the psychological basis of ownership. In H. Ross & O. Friedman (Eds.), Origins of ownership of property. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 132, 1–8.

  • Friedman, O., Van de Vondervoort, J. W., Defeyter, M. A., & Neary, K. R. (2013). First possession, history, and young children’s ownership judgments. Child Development, 84, 1519–1525.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gallese, V., & Sinigaglia, C. (2011). What is so special with embodied simulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(11), 512–519.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gintis, H. (2007). The evolution of private property. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 64(1), 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Glenberg, A. M., & Robertson, D. A. (2000). Symbol grounding and meaning: a comparison of high-dimensional and embodied theories of meaning. Journal of Memory and Language, 43(3), 379–401.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haggard, P., & Eitam, B. (Eds.). (2015). The sense of agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heine, B. (1997). Possession—cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Herslund, M., & Baron, I. (2001). Introduction: Dimensions of possession. In M. Herslund, I. Baron, & F. Sørensen (Eds.), Dimensions of possession (pp. 1–26). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heyes, C. (2011). Automatic imitation. Psychological Bulletin, 137(3), 463.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Jackendoff, R. (1992). Languages of the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Jackson, P. L., Meltzoff, A. N., & Decety, J. (2006). Neural circuits involved in imitation and perspective-taking. NeuroImage, 31, 429–439.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J., & Thaler, R. (1990). Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem. Journal of Political Economy, 98, 1325–1348.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kanngiesser, P., & Hood, B. (2014). Not by labor alone: considerations for value influence use of the labor rule in ownership transfers. Cognitive Science, 38(2), 353–366.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Kaschak, M. P., Madden, C. J., Therriault, D. J., Yaxley, R. H., Aveyard, M., Blanchard, A. A., & Zwaan, R. A. (2005). Perception of motion affects language processing. Cognition, 94(3), B79–B89.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Kummer, H. (1991). Evolutionary transformations of possessive behavior. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6, 75–83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liuzza, M. T., Setti, A., & Borghi, A. M. (2012). Kids observing other kids’ hands: visuomotor priming in children. Consciousness and Cognition, 21, 383–392.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lugli, L., Obertis, A. C., & Borghi, A. M. (2016). Hitting is male, giving is female: automatic imitation and complementarity during action observation. Psychological Research. doi:10.1007/s00426-016-0808-8

  • Ma, K., & Hommel, B. (2015). Body-ownership for actively operated non-corporeal objects. Consciousness and Cognition, 36, 75–86.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Marzoli, D., Mitaritonna, A., Moretto, F., Carluccio, P., & Tommasi, L. (2011). The handedness of imagined bodies in action and the role of perspective taking. Brain and Cognition, 75, 51–59.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • McAdams, R. H. (2009). Beyond the Prisoners’ Dilemma: coordination, game theory, and law. Southern California Law Review, 82, 209–258.

    Google Scholar 

  • Merrill, T. W. (1998). Property and the right to exclude. Nebraska Law Review, 77, 730–755.

    Google Scholar 

  • Merrill, T. W. (2015). Possession and ownership. In Tun-Chien Chang (Ed.), Law and Economics of possession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, G., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1976). Language and Perception. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Noles, N. S., Keil, F. C., Bloom, P., & Gelman, S. A. (2012). Children’s and adults’ intuitions about who can own things. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 12, 265–286.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Palamar, M., Le, D. T., & Friedman, O. (2012). Acquiring ownership and the attribution of responsibility. Cognition, 124, 201–208.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Peck, J., Barger, V. A., & Webb, A. (2013). In search of a surrogate for touch: The effect of haptic imagery on perceived ownership. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2(2013), 189–196.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peck, J., & Shu, S. B. (2009). The effect of mere touch on perceived ownership. Journal of Consumer Research, 36, 434–447.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pezzulo, G., & Castelfranchi, C. (2007). The symbol detachment problem. Cognitive Processing, 8, 115–131.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Pietraszewski, D., & Shaw, A. (2015). Not by strength alone: children’s conflict expectations follow the logic of the asymmetric war of attrition. Human Nature, 26(1), 44–72.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Pollux, P. M., Hermens, F., & Willmott, A. P. (2016). Age-congruency and contact effects in body expression recognition from point-light displays (PLD). PeerJ, 4, e2796.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Ranzini, M., Borghi, A. M., & Nicoletti, R. (2011). With hands I don’t centre! Action- and object-related effects of hand-cueing in the line bisection. Neuropsychologia, 49, 2918–2928.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Rose, C. M. (1985). Possession as the Origin of Property. The University of Chicago Law Review, 52(1), 73–88.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ross, H. S. (1996). Negotiating principles of entitlement in sibling property disputes. Developmental Psychology, 32, 90–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scorolli, C. (2014). Embodiment and Language. In L. Shapiro (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. (pp. 127–138), Routledge: Taylor & Francis. ISBN: 978-0-415-62361-2.

  • Scorolli, C., & Borghi, A. (2007). Sentence comprehension and action: effector specific modulation of the motor system. Brain Research, 1130(26), 119–124.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sherratt, T. N., & Mesterton-Gibbons, M. (2015). The evolution of respect for property. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 28, 1185–1202. doi:10.1111/jeb.12648.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sugden, R. (2004). The economics of rights, co-operation and welfare (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tummolini, L., Scorolli, C., & Borghi, A. M. (2013). Disentangling the sense of ownership from the sense of fairness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 101–102.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Turk, D. J., van Bussel, K., Waiter, G. D., & Macrae, C. N. (2011). Mine and me: exploring the neural basis of object ownership. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(11), 3657–3668.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wertz & German. (2007). Belief-desire reasoning in the explanation of behavior: do actions speak louder than words? Cognition, 105, 184–194.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wolf, J. R., Arkes, H. R., & Muhanna, W. A. (2008). The power of touch: an examination of the effect of duration of physical contact on the valuation of objects. Judgment and Decision Making, 3(6), 476–482.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zwaan, R.A. (2004). The immersed experiencer: Toward an embodied theory of language comprehension. In B.H. Ross (Ed.) Psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 35–62), vol. 44, New York: Academic.

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Community—project ROSSI: Emergence of communication in RObots through Sensorimotor and Social Interaction (Grant Agreement No. 216125) and project SINTELNET: European Network for Social Intelligence (Grant Agreement No. 286380). We would like to thank Stefania Bigatti and Francesca Rossini for collecting data of the last experiment.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat, 5, 40100, Bologna, Italy

    Claudia Scorolli

  2. Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Anna M. Borghi

  3. Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, CNR, Rome, Italy

    Anna M. Borghi & Luca Tummolini

Authors
  1. Claudia Scorolli
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Anna M. Borghi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Luca Tummolini
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Claudia Scorolli.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

No conflict exists. Author Claudia Scorolli declares that she has no conflict of interest; author Anna Borghi declares that she has no conflict of interest; author Luca Tummolini declares that he has no conflict of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (XLSX 50 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Scorolli, C., Borghi, A.M. & Tummolini, L. Cues of control modulate the ascription of object ownership. Psychological Research 82, 929–954 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0871-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0871-9

Search

Navigation