Young Children’s Differential Treatment of Objects and Extended Layouts in Drawing Production

• In Event: 1-031 - Children’s Drawings as Representations of Their Spatial Cognition

Integrative Statement

By age three to four years, children begin to capture object shape information in their drawings (Cox, 2005; Drake & Winner, 2012), and objects predominate the content of children’s drawings through development (Machón, 2013; Villarroel & Ortega, 2016). A rich body of research in the cognitive sciences has investigated how children treat the geometry of small-scale objects differently from how they treat the geometry of large-scale scenes. For example, when using a perspectival line drawing to find locations on a small-scale Lego object, children rely on the shapes of the object’s relevant landmarks, but they ignore directional information (e.g., they mix up a target to the right of the tall-skinny part on the object with one to its left). In contrast, when a similar drawing refers to a large-scale room with the same landmark and metric properties as the Lego object, children rely on the distance and directional information of the room, ignoring the shapes of landmarks (e.g., they go to the right of the far wall but ignore that there’s a short-wide landmark there instead of a tall-skinny one; Dillon & Spelke, 2015). Might the predominance of objects in children’s early depictions be related to the ease of drawing object shapes versus the distances and directions of scene layouts?

The present study explores the frequency and richness of object and scene geometry in young children’s drawing production. The design, analyses, and hypotheses were preregistered on the Open Science Framework. Thirty-two 4-year-old children (median = 4.48 years, range = 4.03 years – 4.99 years, 15 females) sat at the entrance of each of four “forts” in a semi-counterbalanced order (Fig. 1). Children were asked to draw exactly what they saw (after Lewis et al., 1993). Forts included different colored objects, walls, and surface features, matched in complexity. After children indicated that a drawing was complete, they were asked to point out each element in their drawing and then touch it in the fort; a coder labeled a photograph of the drawing. Offline, the coder enumerated the number of spatial elements per category and the geometric richness of each element by its dimensionality. 25% of the data was recoded from video by a different coder, not present during testing, and reliability was high (mixed-model ordinal logistic regression, odds of coder 2 producing coder 1’s results = 0.94, P < .001).

Children drew more objects than walls (Fig. 2), and they drew objects with greater dimensionality than they drew walls (Fig. 2). Children may have found the small-scale shapes of objects easier to draw as 2D forms on a flat page as opposed to the distances and directions of the scene’s large-scale elements. Or, they may have a heightened interest in objects in everyday life or in the context of pictorial representations. Future studies varying the communicative intent of drawings can distinguish between these possibilities. Both possibilities suggest that probing such representational tendencies may elucidate the use of object and scene geometry in children’s symbolic and creative production.

Author

• Moira Rose Dillon, New York University
  Presenting Author