Research on the early conceptualization of objects suggests that knowledge about causal and functional properties plays a crucial role already in infancy. This becomes apparent in a variety of early cognitive abilities. The first part of the talk focuses on infants’ sensitivity to causal and functional information when classifying unfamiliar objects (object categorization) and determining the number of objects involved in a given event (object individuation). The focus of the second part of the talk will be on infants’ attention to function information within a social communication context. As suggested by natural pedagogy theory (Csibra & Gergely 2006, 2009), infants are biased to interpret ostensive-referential communication as conveying kind-relevant and generalizable information. In a series of experiments we examined what type of information would be taken as kind-relevant and transferred to others when different types of information (color and function) are provided. Main findings suggest that within an ostensive communicative context, one-year-old infants prefer to generalize function information over color information if they are forced to choose. Furthermore, the special status of function information also persists in non-ostensive communicative contexts where infants show person-centered interpretations of the given event. The meaning of the results for natural pedagogy theory in particular as well as for early conceptual development in general will be discussed, future research  will be outlined.