Developmental changes in drawing production under different memory demands in a U.S. and Chinese sample.

Abstract

Children's drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across childhood. What are the major factors that drive developmental changes in children's drawings? To what degree are children's drawings a product of their changing internal category representations versus limited by their visuomotor abilities or their ability to recall the relevant visual information? To explore these questions, we examined the degree to which developmental changes in drawing recognizability vary across different drawing tasks that vary in memory demands (i.e. drawing from verbal vs. picture cues) and with children's shape tracing abilities across two geographical locations (San Jose, US and Beijing, China). We collected digital shape tracings and drawings of common object categories (e.g., cat, airplane) from 4-9-year-olds (N=253). The developmental trajectory of drawing recognizability was remarkably similar when children were asked to draw from pictures vs. verbal cues and across these two geographical locations. In addition, our Beijing sample produced more recognizable drawings but showed similar tracing abilities to children from San Jose. Overall, this work suggests that the developmental trajectory of children's drawings is remarkably consistent and not easily explainable by changes in visuomotor control or working memory; instead, changes in children's drawings over development may at least partly reflect changes in the internal representations of object categories. 3 DEVELOPMENT OF DRAWING Public Significance Statement. The present study examined developmental changes in children's drawings of common object categories from 4-9 years of age. The findings suggest relative consistency in the developmental trajectory of drawing recognizability across two different sites (San Jose, CA and Beijing, China) and two different drawing tasks (verbal vs. picture cues). The digital drawings and stroke-by-stroke records are made available as a resource future work.

Parallel developmental changes in children’s production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts

“…We replicated this finding in a separate controlled experiment in which a researcher was present 52 , suggesting that these effects were not an artifact of data collection at the kiosk (fixed effect of age in Supplementary Table 4, subset of data in ref. 52, Supplementary Fig. 6).…”

“…In a separate experiment 52,69 , children were seated in front of a touchscreen tablet with a trained experimenter. As in the larger dataset, children completed two shape-tracing trials, and then children produced drawings of 12 familiar object categories (airplane, bike, bird, car, cat, chair, cup, hat, house, rabbit, tree, watch) which were randomly assigned to different cue-types (verbal vs. picture).…”

“…Approximately twenty participants were included in each age group (i.e., twenty 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, and 9-year-olds); see full breakdown in ref. 52. No additional demographic data was recorded about the participants.…”

“…All filtered drawings, raw behavioral data from the recognition experiments, and all pre-processed data that support the findings are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/QYMJR, as are the preprocessed data from ref. 52.…”