What can mapping care and learning across everyday material objects tell us about the human mind? Traditional perspectives have often treated objects as passive tools valued mainly for their utility or market worth. In contrast, psychological and cultural research has emphasized the psychological and identity-related significance of material objects.
Building on prior human-object interaction (HOI) research, this study examines care and learning as two previously identified psychological dimensions characterizing meaningful engagement with material artefacts. Using a large-scale online survey of 3441 Japanese adults, we examined how object-related characteristics—such as ownership, shared memories, subjective irreplaceability, mental concentration, instrumentality, perceived monetary value, and difficulty of use—were associated with care and learning. Cluster analysis of 39 object types identified six distinct profiles of care and learning, indicating systematic variation across object types.
Ownership, irreplaceability, and mental concentration showed positive adjusted associations with both care and learning, while shared memories were more strongly associated with learning. In contrast, usage duration and frequency were largely unrelated to either dimension, indicating that temporal exposure alone was not closely associated with care or learning. By mapping patterns of care and learning across diverse everyday objects, this study extends the HOI framework and provides an empirical basis for connecting it with research on the extended self.
Because the study was cross-sectional, the findings should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects. Overall, the results highlight the psychological significance of everyday material artefacts beyond their utility or market value and support closer attention to how people experience and relate to objects in contemporary material culture. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP26K00557, JP26K21775, JP25H00571, JP24H00165, and JP23H00484; JST RISTEX Grant Number JPMJRS23J2; and JST Moonshot R&D Grant Number JPMJMS2011.
University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan The authors declare no competing interests. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Institute of Innovation for Future Society at Nagoya University (Protocol Code: 2020-34; Approval Date: February 3, 2021). All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
The approval covered all procedures for participant recruitment, data collection, and analysis conducted in this research. Electronic informed consent was obtained through the online survey platform before participation between March 2, 2022, and April 3, 2022. Participants were fully informed about the study’s purpose, procedures, and their rights, including voluntary participation and the confidentiality of their responses.
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