1 - Children 2 - Immediate Children 3 - Parent 4 - Objects on shared layers 1: Selects all direct children of the active object 2: Select all children, children's children etc. of the active object 3: Makes the parent of the current object active, and deselects the active object 4: Selects all objects that share at least one layer with the active object Useful for stepping through object hierarchies and for quickly selecting objects belonging together. See my message on bf-committers as well.