I’m interested and active in four areas of research on children’s cognitive development. 1. Children’s understanding of the concept of ownership and sensitivity to factors like object history, effort, and labor versus capital. 2. Children’s tendency to “essentialize” different social categories and links to moral reasoning, as well as mental state understanding. 3. The effects of religious teachings on conceptions of the possible and the impossible over the course of development, and 4. Children’s ideas about the mind and the nature of mental states, as well as the early developmental origins of mind-body dualism. I approach these question from a cultural perspective.