Cultural Factors on Drawing Development: Cross-Cultural Studies Comparing American, Canadian, and Japanese Children’s Drawing

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

Integrative Statement

Recent studies have suggested that college students’ drawings reflect well-documented cross-cultural differences in analytic vs. holistic perception (Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan, & Nisbett, 2008). Specifically, analytic thinkers in the Western cultures (e.g., Canadian, American) tend to prefer linear perspective, which emphasizes one (or a few) focal objects. In contrast, holistic thinkers in East Asian cultures (e.g., Japanese) tend to include a large number of objects with less emphasis on individual objects and tend to place the horizon line higher on the paper than Westerners. While cross-cultural differences in perception have been documented widely, developmental trajectories have not been well explored. Furthermore, previous research has not tested whether children’s performance in the drawing task is related to perceptual tendencies measured by other psychological tests.

In this presentation, we discuss three studies that took both developmental and cultural approaches to compare children’s drawings from three cultural groups. In Studies 1 (n = 495) and 2 (n = 326), we tested the development of landscape drawings among Canadian and Japanese school-age children from Grade 1 through Grade 12 (Senzaki et al., 2014, Nand et al., 2014). In classroom settings, participants created a landscape drawing, including a tree(s), house(s), person(s), a horizon, and anything else they wanted to include. As the dependent variable, we measured the height of the horizon.

We found that at Grade 1, only 31% of Canadian and 26% of Japanese children understood the concept of a horizon. When children did not understand the concept of a horizon, there were no significant cross-cultural differences, F(1, 58) = 0.37, p = .55. Once children understood the concept of a horizon from Grade 2 and older, there were significant cross cultural differences in the location of the horizon in all grades except Grade 8, F(1, 476) = 85.24, p < .001, ηp2 = .152 (Study 1; Figure 1) and F(1, 352) = 56.63, p = .001, ηp2 = .139 (Study 2; Figure 2). Similar to adults, Japanese children placed the horizon higher in their landscape drawings compared to Canadian children. At Grade 8, we found the effect of cultural drift; that is, adolescents’ landscape drawings deviated from that of culturally specific psychological tendencies seen in younger children and adults.

In Study 3, we aimed to analyze the relation between children’s drawings and other perceptual tendencies measured by different psychological tasks. In addition to the drawing task, American 6- to 7-year-old children (n = 35) completed 1) Ebbinghaus illusion (Imada et al., 2013), 2) Facial emotion puzzle (Kuwabara et al., 2011), and 3) Framed-Line Test (FLT, Kitayama et al., 2013). These tasks have been used in previous cross-cultural studies with children. The results indicated that children’s performance in the drawing task was correlated with that of Facial emotion puzzle, r(34) = .31, p = .06, and FLT, r(34) = .36, p = .03, but not with the Ebbinghaus illusion task, r(34) = .21, ns. We discuss the influence of culture on the development of children’s drawings from Grade 1 through Grade 12.

Authors

• Sawa Senzaki, University of Wisconsin -Green Bay
  Presenting Author

• Takahiko Masuda, University of Alberta
  Non-Presenting Author