Deterioration and recovery of DAP IQ scores in the repeated assessment of the Naglieri Draw-A-Person (DAP) test in 6- to 12-year-old children.

Abstract

The study investigated whether mental age in children, as assessed by the IQ in the Draw-A-Person (DAP) test (Naglieri, 1988), can be improved by practice. In addition, it was tested whether children needed novel content to keep up their performance level during test repetition. The DAP test was given to 6-, 8-, 10-, and 12-year-old children (N ϭ 80) 3 times. In addition, they drew a police figure 2 times, with task sequence counterbalanced. Repeated drawings resulted in significant omission of detail and deterioration of scores, but the novel task instruction temporarily recovered the IQ scores. This did not occur in the reverse sequence of the tasks, with the less specified DAP instruction given in the 2nd half of the drawing series. Furthermore, structural regressions in the human figure drawing could be observed in individual cases. However, 12-year-olds did not need the external introduction of novel content to maintain their IQ score. Correlations showed that this age group redefined their drawing plan on each repetition, and often created unique figures on each occasion, even if the instruction had stayed the same.

How to learn places without spatial concepts: Does the what-and-where reaction time system in children regulate learning during stimulus repetition?

“…Novelty is assumed to have an important wake-up and refresher function that increases mental alertness (Lange-Küttner et al, 2014;Luchins, 1942Luchins, , 1950, while repetition increases familiarity in order to strengthen and consolidate memory traces (Ebbinghaus, 1964;Lange-Küttner, 2011). It was not obvious to participants that the objects-in-places were repeated because trials were presented in a randomized sequence.…”

“…School-aged children tend to loose details in repetitive productive tasks (Lange-Küttner, Küttner, & Chromekova, 2014), just like adults loose detail when they extract the gist of a narrative in their episodic memories (Bartlett, 1932). Furthermore, visual or motoric re-visiting of object locations that were inspected before leads to inefficient place memory (Danziger, Kingstone, & Snyder, 1998;Klein, 1988;Posner, Rafal, Choate, & Vaughan, 1985).…”

“…The current study investigates whether the lack of place learning in children occurred because of a lack of repetition and practice, or because of a lack of novelty that would maintain children's interest. Novelty appears to be especially important because 6-to 10-year-old children needed novel content to maintain the level of their Draw-A-Person (DAP) IQ score (Lange-Küttner et al, 2014). Only 11-year-olds were able to keep their DAP IQ score at the same level during repetition because they created novelty by themselves on each test occasion.…”

Postprint: "What Does the DAP: IQ Measure?: Drawing Comparisons between Drawing Performance and Developmental Assessments"

“…Reliability of the DAP:IQ may be negatively affected by fatigue when the task is completed repeatedly [21]. Recently, a large twin study [2] found that drawing performance and intelligence are both heritable, and found a relationship between DAP task performance at age four and intelligence 1Inter-rater reliability on the DAP:IQ reported by [40] was r = 0.83, whereas the test developers [30] report inter-rater reliability measures of r = .95 for drawings by older children and adults (age range 11-75), and r = .91 for younger children (age range [6][7][8][9][10][11] at age fourteen, ten years later.…”

Sex Differences as a Statistical Variable

“…Instead, only older children would attend less to surface details. Hence, we concluded that girls-like in human figure drawings [33,[35][36][37]-were drawing more detail. However, different to the human figure drawings where girls excel in detail, the details of the cubes had no names, still they would embark on laboriously drawing details in this cube drawing task.…”