On the relationship between children's perspective taking in complex scenes and their spatial drawing ability

Depicting space and volume in drawings is challenging for young children in particular. It has been assumed that several cognitive skills may contribute to children's drawing. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between perspective‐taking skills in complex scenes and the spatial characteristics in drawings of 5‐ to 9‐year‐olds (N= 121). Perspective taking was assessed by two tasks: (a) a visual task similar to the three‐mountains task, in which the children had to select a three‐dimensional model that showed the view on a scene from particular perspective and (b) a spatial construction task, in which children had to plastically reconstruct a three‐dimensional scene as it would appear from a new point of view. In the drawing task, the children were asked to depict a three‐dimensional scene exactly as it looked like from their own point of view. Several spatial features in the drawings were coded. The results suggested that children's spatial drawing and their perspective‐taking skills were related. The axes system and the spatial relations between objects in the drawings in particular were predicted, beyond age, by certain measures of the two perspective‐taking tasks. The results are discussed in the light of particular demands that might underlay both perspective taking and spatial drawing.     

The development of children's expressive drawing

Two studies are presented on expressive happy and sad drawings made by British 4‐ to 12‐year‐olds (n = 80 and 160, respectively) in which the drawings were assessed individually for the quantity and quality of expressive devices. Quantity was measured in the number of appropriate expressive content themes and formal properties evident in each drawing. Quality was rated on a Likert scale on the extent to which the drawing expressed the intended mood. Both the quantity and quality of expressive happy and sad drawings of predetermined and free topics increased with age. Improvements in content expression, but much less so with expressive formal properties, accounted for the development of quantity. A slower period of development between 6 and 9 years for both measures was consistently found, with a significant improvement often shown among the 12‐year‐olds. The finding that happy drawings were scored higher than sad drawings is explained in respect of adult and child expectations of pictures. Correlations between expressive scores and performance on a visual realism drawing task tentatively indicated that expressive and realism skills in drawing are only weakly related. The development of expressive drawing is considered in the context of the delivery of art education in schools.     

Effects of drawing on children's item recall

In four experiments, we used item recall tasks to investigate recent claims that young children's event recall can be facilitated by drawing. In Experiments 1 to 3, children of ages 5 to 8 years were tested 4 h after presentation for recall of a set of 25 items that had been presented in groups on a colored, segmented board. In Experiment 1, recall was enhanced by replacement of the objects on the board as they were recalled, but not by drawing them. In Experiments 2 and 3, drawing the board and objects concurrently with or just prior to verbal recall not only failed to facilitate recall, but significantly reduced the number of items reported by 5- to 6-year-olds. In Experiment 4, drawing again impaired recall of items that had been presented as paired associates. Overall, results indicate that under some conditions drawing can impair children's recall rather than facilitate it, as reported in several recent studies.     

Factors influencing the use of transparency in children's drawing

When young children draw a scene in which one object partially occludes another, they often depict hidden features of the occluded object by rendering the nearer object transparent. This may signify a motive to produce drawings that are informative. Three experiments are reported in which a simple paradigm is employed to consider this possible basis of transparency drawing. Experiment 1 established a gradual decrease in the use of this device across the 5–7-year age range. Its occurrence could not be ascribed to a simple lack of graphic skill and it was not readily inhibited by stronger perceptual marking of scene boundaries. The extent to which children were purposefully producing informative drawings was evaluated in Expts 2 and 3. Because an increase in occluded information actually served to inhibit transparencies, it is argued that they need not reflect such a communicative attitude. An alternative account is proposed whereby drawing decisions are guided, sometimes inappropriately, by the structure of cognitive representations children form of scenes. Transparencies signify a failure to anticipate certain graphic ambiguities thereby generated. However, they may be inhibited if the geometry of a particular scene forces the child to confront such ambiguity at the outset of drawing.     

Early developments in children's spatial monitoring

This research focused on children's ability to monitor both stable and changing aspects of the spatial field as movements occur. In two experiments, children ranging from 30 months to 5 years of age were tested on spatial transposition problems involving either a single hidden object or a different object in each of three cups. Three developmental trends were identified. First, there was some evidence of developmental improvements in children's understanding of the movements they observed. Although all age groups gave some evidence of understanding that objects move with their containers in Experiment 1, the older children's understanding appeared to be more solid than the 30-montholds in that their performance was not misled by conflicting cues to search at the initial hiding place in Experiment 2. Second, children get better at allocating their attention to the key parts of the spatial field when there is only one object to monitor. Third, children's attentional capacity expands so that they can monitor multiple objects at the same time. These latter two trends produce continuing developments in spatial cognitive performance long after children have achieved an essentially correct understanding of the movements they observe. In addition, they help clarify variations in children's performance on many spatial-cognitive tasks used with age groups ranging from infants to elementary school children.     

Young children's plans differ for writing and drawing

Forty-eight children (mean age= 64.4 months, range = 52–75 months), unschooled in writing, were asked to draw a picture of and write the name for common objects depicted in line drawings. Analyses of the children's videotaped action sequences while drawing and writing revealed reliable, systematic differences. For example, drawings were often made with continuous outlines that could be filled in, and marks were put on the page in a random fashion. “Writing” was characterized by discrete marks on the page arranged in a linear fashion and generated from left to right. We propose that young children's plans for drawing and writing are constrained by domain-specific knowledge about words and objects. It follows that they have implicit knowledge of the fact that different notation systems must honor structural differences between the domains being notated.     

Young children's discovery of spatial classification

Around the age of 18 months, children begin to classify objects spatially by kind, placing objects of the same kind close together in space and placing unlike objects apart. This behavior may be symbolic in the sense that children use spatial proximity to represent similarity. We examined the possibility that spatial classification is discovered during play—that the external products of play lead children to use space to represent similarity. Experiment 1 was a longitudinal study of four children's classification behaviors, observed from the age of 16 to 21 months. Results suggest that play with one kind of object to the exclusion of another kind leads to the discovery of spatial classification. Experiment 2 examined how children's tendencies to interact with one category might promote spatial classification of multiple categories. Twenty-four 18-month-old children who did not yet spatially classify objects by kind participated. Children who were given the experience of playing with two kinds of objects in a context that promoted interaction with only one kind were more likely to demonstrate spontaneous spatial classification of multiple kinds in a subsequent test period. Children who played equally with both kinds did not show heightened spontaneous classification. The results further suggest that comparison of different kinds during play is critical to the spontaneous occurrence of spatial classification.     

Central executive involvement in children's spatial memory

Previous research with adults found that spatial short-term and working memory tasks impose similar demands on executive resources. We administered spatial short-term and working memory tasks to 8- and 11-year-olds in three separate experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2 an executive suppression task (random number generation) was found to impair performances on a short-term memory task (Corsi blocks), a working memory task (letter rotation), and a spatial visualisation task (paper folding). In Experiment 3 an articulatory suppression task only impaired performance on the working memory task. These results suggest that short-term and working memory performances are dependent on executive resources. The degree to which the short-term memory task was dependent on executive resources was expected to be related to the amount of experience children have had with such tasks. Yet we found no significant age-related suppression effects. This was attributed to differences in employment of cognitive strategies by the older children.     

Central executive involvement in children's spatial memory

Previous research with adults found that spatial short-term and working memory tasks impose similar demands on executive resources. We administered spatial short-term and working memory tasks to 8- and 11-year-olds in three separate experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2 an executive suppression task (random number generation) was found to impair performances on a short-term memory task (Corsi blocks), a working memory task (letter rotation), and a spatial visualisation task (paper folding). In Experiment 3 an articulatory suppression task only impaired performance on the working memory task. These results suggest that short-term and working memory performances are dependent on executive resources. The degree to which the short-term memory task was dependent on executive resources was expected to be related to the amount of experience children have had with such tasks. Yet we found no significant age-related suppression effects. This was attributed to differences in employment of cognitive strategies by the older children.     

The importance of gesture in children's spatial reasoning

On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, whether they were given explicit instruction or just practice. Regardless of training condition, the more children gestured about moving the pieces when asked to explain how they solved the spatial transformation task, the better they performed on the task, with boys gesturing about movement significantly more (and performing better) than girls. Gesture thus provides useful information about children's spatial strategies, raising the possibility that gesture training may be particularly effective in improving children's mental rotation skills.     

On the coding of spatial information

Two experiments studied recall of objects and their locations in an intentional-incidental learning paradigm. When studying spatial information, the usual incidental condition is not truly incidental, because subjects often deliberately use locations to help organize objects for recall. Therefore, a true incidental task was devised in which neither objects nor locations were expected to be recalled and for which explicit encoding of locations was irrelevant. There was only a small loss in recall of objects or their locations in a true incidental condition. It was concluded that a great deal of location information is automatically coded into long-term memory storage in the sense that active processing is not required. The data were contrasted with incidental processing of other attributes, such as color. Although adults performed better than children, there were no age-related interactions, indicating similarity of functioning at all ages studied.     

Eye movements and spatial coding in reading

Summary Two experiments are reported which test the hypothesis that during reading subjects maintain in working memory a record of the spatial location of items and that this code is used to guide reinspections. In the first experiment the premisses of short syllogisms were read, one word at a time, under three presentation conditions: (a) in correct temporal order and in appropriate sequential spatial locations; (b) in correct temporal order but in random spatial locations; (c) in correct temporal order and in a single central location. A measure was taken of the time to respond to possible conclusions of the syllogisms. Solution times were longer in conditions (b) and (c) relative to (a). In the second experiment eye movements were recorded as subjects judged the soundness of auditorily presented conclusions following visual presentation of the premisses of syllogisms. Non-random eye movements took place during the solution phase directed to locations previously occupied by text in the display.     

Impairment of gaze-directed spatial coding in recent-onset schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia show deficits in core cognitive functions as well as in social cognition. The aim of the present study was to test whether deficits in social cognition influence nonsocial, “cold”, cognition. Thirty-five patients with recent-onset schizophrenia (SC) and 30 healthy controls (HC) performed a Simon task with social and simple geometric stimuli. We investigated whether the Simon effect, the slowing of reaction times produced by stimulus incongruities in the task-irrelevant spatial domain, differs between patients and healthy participants as a function of the social nature of the cues. The Simon effect was generated by a schematic drawing of human eyes (social cues) or rectangles (nonsocial cues). Overall, patients had longer reaction times than HC. In the eye-like condition, the Simon effect was significantly stronger for HC than for SC. In HC the Simon effect was significantly stronger in the eye-like than in the rectangle condition. In patients, the Simon effect did not differ significantly between both conditions. Thus, the influence of social cues was greatly reduced in the patient group. Current psychopathology or antipsychotic treatment did not influence results. The present study supports earlier findings of altered processing of schematic social cues in patients with schizophrenia, especially when gaze is task-irrelevant.     

Constraints on representational change: evidence from children's drawing.

This paper uses children's drawing as clues to general constraints on internal representational change and flexibility. Fifty-four children between 4 and 11 years of age each produced six drawings. They were first asked to draw a house, and then to draw a house that does not exist. The same procedure was used for man and animal. The technique forced children into operating on their normal, efficient drawing procedures, and allowed the researcher to ascertain the types of constraint that obtain on representational change and flexibility. Striking developmental differences emerged between the 4- to 6-year-old age group and the 8- to 10-year-old age group. Changes introduced by the younger children involved deletions and changes in size and shape, whereas older children changed position and orientation of elements and added elements from other conceptual categories, resulting in ever-increasing inter-representational flexibility. Development is accounted for in terms of reiterated cycles of change from internal representations specified as a sequentially fixed list, embodying a constraint that was inherent in the earlier procedural representations, to internal representations specified as a structured, yet flexibly ordered set of manipulable features. The constraints are considered to be general and are compared with work on seriation and number in children, and on phonological awareness and musical ability in adults. The results are integrated into a general model of developmental change which is compatible both with initial modularity and with subsequent domain-general constraints.     

Directed movements and the body-proportion effect in preschool children's human figure drawing

Drawing a human figure involves mastery over complex planning problems. The variant forms which young children produce may be an index of these. The most common variant is the “tadpole figure” with arms seemingly on the head. It is known that children who spontaneously draw this variant will attach arms correctly to the trunk of an incomplete pre-drawn figure if the head is small, but will attach them to the head if that exceeds the trunk in size. The present study shows that this body-proportion effect cannot be reliably modified by directing the pen to the head or trunk for the purpose of drawing body-parts other than arms; and that the arms are much more subject to the effect than the legs, nose, navel or ears. Experimental analysis of drawing based on completion-tasks can in principle help to bring out, and put under stimulus-control, performance characteristics which cannot reliably be inferred from post-hoc inspection of spontaneous finished products.     

The coding and transformation of spatial information

The present paper examines the mental processes involved in inferring perspective changes that result either from the rotation of a spatial array or from the rotation of the viewer of that array. Piaget has shown that viewer-rotation problems are difficult when children must choose among pictures or models of an array from differing perspectives. We showed earlier that, with parallel tasks, array-rotation problems are much easier than viewer-rotation problems. We proposed that in solving these problems, subjects interpret the instructions literally, recoding the position of the viewer vis-à-vis the array for viewer-rotation problems and recoding the array with respect to its spatial framework for arrayrotation problems. At that time, we proposed a second principle to explain why Piagetian perspective problems are so difficult; namely, that children have special difficulty in recoding viewer position (egocentrism). The present experiments show that, when subjects are asked a different sort of question on such tasks, viewer-rotation problems become easy and array-rotation problems become difficult. The results show that the difficulty of the Piagetian perspective task is not due to egocentrism; i.e., to difficulty recoding viewer position. The results of all these rotational-transformation tasks can be explained if we add a different second principle to the principle of literalness of problem interpretation. This new second principle posits that the array is fixed vis-à-vis the spatial context rather than that the viewer is fixed vis-à-vis the array.     

Modes of spatial coding in the Simon task*

Many models of the Simon effect assume that categorical spatial representations underlie the phenomenon. The present study tested this assumption explicitly in two experiments, both of which involved eight possible spatial positions of imperative stimuli arranged horizontally on the screen. In Experiment 1, the eight stimulus locations were marked with eight square boxes that appeared at the same time during a trial. Results showed gradually increasing Simon effects from the central locations to the outer locations. In Experiment 2, the eight stimulus locations consisted of a combination of three frames of spatial reference (hemispace, hemifield, and position relative to the fixation), with each frame appearing in different timings. In contrast to Experiment 1, results showed an oscillating pattern of the Simon effect across the horizontal positions. These findings are discussed in terms of grouping factors involved in the Simon task. The locations seem to be coded as a single continuous dimension when all are visible at once as in Experiment 1, but they are represented as a combination of the lateral categories (“left” vs. “right”) with multiple frames of reference when the reference frames are presented successively as in Experiment 2.