Brief article Preschoolers favor the creator’s label when reasoning about an artifact’s function Vikram K. Jaswal * Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 400400, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, USA Received 3 June 2005; revised 26 July 2005; accepted 28 July 2005 Abstract The creator of an artifact, by virtue of having made the object, has privileged knowledge about its intended function. Do children recognize that the label an artifact’s creator uses can convey this privileged information? 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with an object that looked like a member of one familiar artifact category, but which the speaker referred to with the label of a different familiar category (e.g. a key-like object was called a “spoon”). Children who heard the speaker refer to the object as something she made were more likely to assign its function on the basis of the anomalous label she used than those who heard it referred to as something the speaker found. Thus, even very young children expect a unique connection between the label the creator of an artifact uses and the function she intends it to have. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Design stance; Function; Labels; Children; Artifacts; Creator’s intent Adults assume that artifacts are intentionally created by a designer in order to fulfill a particular function (Bloom, 1996; Dennett, 1987; Kelemen, 2004). An artifact’s function can often be inferred from its appearance. If something looks like a key, then chances are, it was intended to be a key and to have the function of a key. Another cue to an object’s intended function is its name. If something is called a “key”, it is probably meant to have the function of a key. In a recent study, Jaswal (2004) asked 4-year-old children to judge the function of an artifact that looked like a member of one familiar category, but which was referred to with Cognition 99 (2006) B83–B92 www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT 0022-2860/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.07.006 * Tel.: C1 434 982 4709. E-mail address: jaswal@virginia.edu.