Two experiments investigated the effects of the significance given to a topic on the size it was drawn by children aged between 4 and 7 years. In Expt 1, children were asked to copy the outline of a man. Immediately afterwards, all the children were asked to make a second drawing of the outline, either imagining that the outline was of a nice person or a nasty person, or so that the second drawing was the same as their first. Compared with the control condition, drawings of the nasty man were made reliably smaller, and drawings of the nice man were made non‐reliably larger. In Expt 2, children were asked to make drawings of an apple which was then characterized as ‘nice’ or ‘nasty’ for different groups of children. The nice characterization reliably increased the size of apple drawings; however, nasty apples, unlike nasty men, were not drawn significantly smaller than in the control condition. We discuss the implications of these results for the hypothesis that the significance of a topic is reflected in the size of the drawings children make of that topic.
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