In The Second Self (1984), Sherry Turkle describes the computer as an evocative object, one that raises new questions regarding our common sense of the distinction between artifacts and intelligent others. Her studies include an examination of the impact of computer-based artifacts on children's conceptions of the difference between categories such as “alive” versus “not alive” and “machine” versus “person.” In dealing with the questions that computer-based objects evoke, children make clear that the differentiation of physical from psychological entities, which as adults we largely take for granted, is the end product of a process of establishing the relationship between the observable behavior of a thing and its underlying nature. Children have a tendency, for example, to attribute life to physical objects on the basis of behaviors such as autonomous motion or reactivity, though they reserve humanity for entities evidencing such things as emotion, speech. and apparent thought or purposefulness. Turkle's observation with respect to computational artifacts is that children ascribe to them an “almost aliveness” and a psychology, while maintaining their distinctness from human beings: a view that, as Turkle points out, is remarkable among other things for its correspondence to the views held by those who are the artifacts' designers.