The Roles of Emotional Comprehension and Representational Drawing Skill in Children's Expressive Drawing

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the roles of emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill in children's expressive drawing. Fifty 7‐ to 10‐year‐olds were asked to produce two (happy and sad) expressive drawings, two representational drawings (drawing of a man running and drawing of a house) and to answer the Test of Emotion Comprehension (Pons & Harris, 2000). The expressive drawings were assessed on the number of expressive subject matter themes (‘content expression’) and the overall quality of expression on a 5‐point scale. Each of the representational drawings was measured on a scale assessing detail and visual realism criteria, and contributed to a single representational drawing skill score. In line with our predictions, we found that both emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill accounted for a significant variance in children's expressive drawings. We explain that children's developing emotional comprehension may allow them to consider more detailed and poignant expressive ideas for their drawings and that their developing representational drawing skill facilitates the graphic execution of these emotional ideas. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of object type on the spatial analogies in Korean preschoolers

We tested young children’s spatial reasoning in a match-to-sample task, manipulating the objects in the task (abstract geometric shapes, line drawings of realistic objects, or both). Korean 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 161) generalized the target spatial configuration (i.e., on, in, above) more easily when the sample used geometric shapes and the choices used realistic objects than the reverse (i.e., realistic-object sample to geometric-shape choices). With within-type stimuli (i.e., sample and choices were both geometric shapes or both realistic objects), 5-year-old, but not 4-year-old, children generalized the spatial relations more easily with geometric shapes than realistic objects. In addition, children who knew more locative terms (e.g., “in”, “on”) performed better on the task, suggesting a link to children’s spatial vocabulary. The results demonstrate an advantage of geometric shapes over realistic objects in facilitating young children’s performance on a match-to-sample spatial reasoning task.     

Object Recognition Difficulty in Visual Apperceptive Agnosia

Two patients with visual apperceptive agnosia were examined on tasks assessing the appreciation of visual material. Elementary visual functioning was relatively preserved, but they had profound difficulty recognizing and naming line drawings. More detailed evaluation revealed accurate recognition of regular geometric shapes and colors, but performance deteriorated when the shapes were made more complex visually, when multiple-choice arrays contained larger numbers of simple targets and foils, and when a mental manipulation such as a rotation was required. The recognition of letters and words was similarly compromised. Naming, recognition, and anomaly judgments of colored pictures and real objects were more accurate than similar decisions involving black-and-white line drawings. Visual imagery for shapes, letters, and objects appeared to be more accurate than visual perception of the same materials. We hypothesize that object recognition difficulty in visual apperceptive agnosia is due to two related factors: the impaired appreciation of the visual perceptual features that constitute objects, and a limitation in the cognitive resources that are available for processing demanding material within the visual modality.     

Seeing structure: Shape skeletons modulate perceived similarity

An intrinsic part of seeing objects is seeing how similar or different they are relative to one another. This experience requires that objects be mentally represented in a common format over which such comparisons can be carried out. What is that representational format? Objects could be compared in terms of their superficial features (e.g., degree of pixel-by-pixel overlap), but a more intriguing possibility is that they are compared on the basis of a deeper structure. One especially promising candidate that has enjoyed success in the computer vision literature is the shape skeleton—a geometric transformation that represents objects according to their inferred underlying organization. Despite several hints that shape skeletons are computed in human vision, it remains unclear how much they actually matter for subsequent performance. Here, we explore the possibility that shape skeletons help mediate the ability to extract visual similarity. Observers completed a same/different task in which two shapes could vary either in their skeletal structure (without changing superficial features such as size, orientation, and internal angular separation) or in large surface-level ways (without changing overall skeletal organization). Discrimination was better for skeletally dissimilar shapes: observers had difficulty appreciating even surprisingly large differences when those differences did not reorganize the underlying skeletons. This pattern also generalized beyond line drawings to 3-D volumes whose skeletons were less readily inferable from the shapes’ visible contours. These results show how shape skeletons may influence the perception of similarity—and more generally, how they have important consequences for downstream visual processing.

     

Children's visual descriptions

The aim of the experiments described below was to elucidate aspects of children's mental representations of what they see, through studying their drawings of simple geometric forms when copying from standard models. Two specific questions were studied: (a) Do children produce symbolic representations based, as in machine perception, on decomposition of the visual object into features or properties, subsequently reaggregated to a greater or lesser degree, rather than attempts to copy the visual appearance of the model? The answer was affirmative, though the phenomenon is relatively rare, (b) Does a child's drawings of simple geometric drawings improve if he can watch an adult do the same drawings first? This has been asserted in the literature and bears on the question of static versus procedural representation. In a sample of 499 drawings made by children aged from 2½ to 5 years we showed that such an effect is absent or very small.     

The psychophysics of chasing: A case study in the perception of animacy

Psychologists have long been captivated by the perception of animacy – the fact that even simple moving shapes may appear to engage in animate, intentional, and goal-directed movements. Here we report several new types of studies of a particularly salient form of perceived animacy: chasing, in which one shape (the ‘wolf’) pursues another shape (‘the sheep’). We first demonstrate two new cues to perceived chasing – chasing subtlety (the degree to which the wolf deviates from perfectly ‘heat-seeking’ pursuit) and directionality (whether and how the shapes ‘face’ each other). We then use these cues to show how it is possible to assess the objective accuracy of such percepts, and to distinguish the immediate perception of chasing from those more subtle (but nevertheless real) types of ‘stalking’ that cannot be readily perceived. We also report several methodological advances. Previous studies of the perception of animacy have faced two major challenges: (a) it is difficult to measure perceived animacy with quantitative precision; and (b) task demands make it difficult to distinguish perception from higher-level inferences about animacy. We show how these challenges can be met, at least in our case study of perceived chasing, via tasks based on dynamic visual search (the Find-the-Chase task) and a new type of interactive display (the Don’t-Get-Caught! task).     

Cognitive Processing of Drawing Abilities

This critical review examines constructional apraxia from a cognitive neuropsychological perspective. To our knowledge, van Sommers (1989) is the only researcher to present a global cognitive model of drawing abilities. He organizes it into two hierarchical systems: Marr's model of visual perception and a graphic production system. The latter comprises four hierarchically organized components: depiction decisions, production strategy, contingent planning, and articulatory and economic constraints. Van Sommers' model will be discussed in light of other models and on the basis of empirical neuropsychological studies (Farah, 1984; Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Roncato, Sartori, Masterson, & Rumiati, 1987; van Sommers, 1989). We find that: (1) the Kosslyn and Koenig visual perception model describes more accurately the perceptual components underlying copying than the visual perception system of van Sommers' drawing model, (2) Van Sommers' arguments in favor of a depiction processing as opposed to visual imagery are not convincing, (3) Van Sommers' assumption that a production strategy is a component is unclear, and (4) articulatory and economic constraints are not cognitive components, but constraints imposed during action programming. This literature review leads to a discussion of future research topics and the specificity of constructional apraxia.     

Global shape integration and illusory form perception in the absence of awareness

Previous research on perceptual organization operations still provides contradictory evidence on whether the integration of sparse local elements into coherently unified shapes and the construction of the illusory form are accomplished without the need of awareness. In the present study, three experiments were conducted in which participants were presented with masked (Experiment 1, SOA = 27 ms; Experiment 2; SOA = 53 ms) and unmasked (Experiment 3) primes consisting of geometric shapes (a square or a diamond) that could be congruent or incongruent with subsequent probe stimuli (square vs. diamond). Furthermore, the primes were divided into: a grouping condition (where local elements may group together into global shapes), an illusory condition (where the arrangement of local elements produced illusory shapes) and a hybrid condition (where both operations were presented simultaneously). While no priming effects were found for the shortest SOA (27 ms), both grouping and illusory primes produced significant priming effects in the longer SOA (53 ms). On the other hand, results in Experiment 3 (unmasked) showed strong priming effects for the grouping of the inducers in both the grouping and the hybrid conditions, and also a significant but weaker priming effect for the illusory condition. Overall, our results support the possibility of the integration of local visual features into a global shape in the absence of awareness and, likewise, they suggest an early –subliminal– construction of the illusory shape, implying that feedback projections from higher to lower visual areas are not crucial in the construction of the illusory form.     

Touching words is not enough: How visual experience influences haptic–auditory associations in the “Bouba–Kiki” effect

Since Köhler’s experiments in the 1920s, researchers have demonstrated a correspondence between words and shapes. Dubbed the “Bouba–Kiki” effect, these auditory–visual associations extend across cultures and are thought to be universal. More recently the effect has been shown in other modalities including taste, suggesting the effect is independent of vision. The study presented here tested the “Bouba–Kiki” effect in the auditory–haptic modalities, using 2D cut-outs and 3D models based on Köhler’s original drawings. Presented with shapes they could feel but not see, sighted participants showed a robust “Bouba–Kiki” effect. However, in a sample of people with a range of visual impairments, from congenital total blindness to partial sight, the effect was significantly less pronounced. The findings suggest that, in the absence of a direct visual stimulus, visual imagery plays a role in crossmodal integration.     

Perceptual adaptation to structure-from-motion depends on the size of adaptor and probe objects,but not on the similarity of their shapes

Perceptual adaptation destabilizes the phenomenal appearance of multistable visual displays. Prolonged dominance of a perceptual state fatigues the associated neural population, lowering the likelihood of renewed perception of the same appearance (Nawrot & Blake in Perception & Psychophysics, 49, 230–44, 1991). Here, we used a selective adaptation paradigm to investigate perceptual adaptation for the illusory rotation of ambiguous structure-from-motion (SFM) displays. Specifically, we generated SFM objects with different three-dimensional shapes and presented them in random order, separating successive objects by brief blank periods, which included a mask. To assess the specificity of perceptual adaptation to the shape of SFM objects, we established the probability that a perceived direction of rotation persisted between successive objects of similar or dissimilar shape. We found that the strength of negative aftereffects depended on the volume, but not the shape, of adaptor and probe objects. More voluminous objects were both more effective as adaptor objects and more sensitive as probe objects. Surprisingly, we found these volume effects to be completely independent, since any relationship between two shapes (such as overlap between volumes, similarity of shape, or similarity of velocity profiles) failed to modulate the negative aftereffect. This pattern of results was the opposite of that observed for sensory memory of SFM objects, which reflects similarity between objects, but not volume of individual objects (Pastukhov et al. in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 75, 1215–1229, 2013). The disparate specificities of perceptual adaptation and sensory memory for identical SFM objects suggest that the two aftereffects engage distinct neural representations, consistent with recent brain imaging results (Schwiedrzik et al. in Cerebral Cortex, 2012).     

Developmental Changes in Early Comprehension and Production of Drawings: Evidence From Two Socioeconomic Backgrounds

Two studies examined young children's comprehension and production of representational drawings across and within 2 socioeconomic strata (SES). Participants were 130 middle-SES (MSES) and low-SES (LSES) Argentine children, from 30 to 60 months old, given a task with 2 phases, production and comprehension. The production phase assessed free drawing and drawings from simple 3-dimensional objects (model drawing); the comprehension phase assessed children's understanding of an adult's line drawings of the objects. MSES children solved the comprehension phase of the task within the studied age range; representational production emerged first in model drawing (42 months) and later in free drawing (48 months). The same developmental pathway was observed in LSES children but with a clear asynchrony in the age of onset of comprehension and production: Children understood the symbolic nature of drawings at 42 months old and the first representational drawings were found at 60 months old. These results provide empirical evidence that support the crucial influence of social experiences by organizing and constraining graphic development.     

Evaluating young children''s cognitive capacities through computer versus hand drawings

Young normal and handicapped children, aged 3 to 6 years, were taught to draw a scene of a house, garden and a sky with a computer drawing program that uses icons and is operated by a mouse. The drawings were rated by a team of experts on a 7-category scale. The children's computer- and hand-produced drawings were compared with one another and with results on cognitive, visual and fine motor tests. The computer drawing program made it possible for the children to accurately draw closed shapes, to get instant feedback on the adequacy of the drawing, and to make corrections with ease. It was hypothesized that these features would compensate for the young children's limitations in such cognitive skills, as memory, concentration, planning and accomplishment, as well as their weak motor skills. In addition, it was hypothesized that traditional cognitive ratings of hand drawings may underestimate young children's intellectual ability, because drawing by hand demands motor skills and memory, concentration and planning skills that are more developed than that actually shown by young children. To test the latter hypothesis, the children completed a training program in using a computer to make drawings. The results show that cognitive processes such as planning, analysis and synthesis can be investigated by means of a computer drawing program in a way not possible using traditional pencil and paper drawings. It can be said that the method used here made it possible to measure cognitive abilities "under the floor" of what is ordinarily possible by means of traditionally hand drawings.     

Hierarchical forms processing in adults and children

Two experiments examined child and adult processing of hierarchical stimuli composed of geometric forms. Adults (ages 18-23 years) and children (ages 7-10 years) performed a forced-choice task gauging similarity between visual stimuli consisting of large geometric objects (global level) composed of small geometric objects (local level). The stimuli spatial arrangement was manipulated to assess child and adult reaction times and predisposition toward local or global form categorization under two distinct trial conditions, with varied density of the local forms comprising the global forms. In Experiment 1, children and adults were presented with common, simple geometric shape hierarchical forms composed of ovals and rectangles. In Experiment 2, adults were presented with hierarchical forms composed of the simple geometric shapes, ovals and rectangles, and additional novel complex geometric shapes, “posts” and “arches.” Results show a clear increase of global processing bias across the age ranges of the individuals in the study, with children at 10 years performing similarly to adults on the simple stimuli. In addition, adults presented with the novel complex geometric shapes showed a significant reduction in global processing bias, indicating that form novelty and complexity lead to additional attention to local features in categorization tasks.     

Girls in detail,boys in shape: Gender differences when drawing cubes in depth

The current study tested gender differences in the developmental transition from drawing cubes in two‐ versus three dimensions (3D), and investigated the underlying spatial abilities. Six‐ to nine‐year‐old children (N = 97) drew two occluding model cubes and solved several other spatial tasks. Girls more often unfolded the various sides of the cubes into a layout, also called diagrammatic cube drawing (object design detail). In girls, the best predictor for drawing the cubes was Mental Rotation Test (MRT) accuracy. In contrast, boys were more likely to preserve the optical appearance of the cube array. Their drawing in 3D was best predicted by MRT reaction time and the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). This confirmed boys' stronger focus on the contours of an object silhouette (object shape). It is discussed whether the two gender‐specific approaches to drawing in three dimensions reflect two sides of the appearance–reality distinction in drawing, that is graphic syntax of object design features versus visual perception of projective space.     

Possible effects of forced report order on tachistoscopic recognition of bilaterally presented stimuli: A response to Young and Ellis

Comparing visual field asymmetries for bilaterally presented words and corresponding line drawings, we found an RVF advantage for words and no visual field asymmetry for line drawings. We suggested that the RVF advantage previously obtained by Young, Bion, and Ellis (Brain and Language, 11, 54–65, 1980) for bilaterally presented line drawings may have resulted from a forced order of report procedure, noting that the RVF advantage was greater on trials on which subjects were forced to report in the nonpreferred right-to-left order. Young and Ellis (Brain and Language, 20, 166–171, 1983) attempt to discredit this claim and maintain their hypothesis that the RVF advantage for line drawings is attributable to better temporary storage of these stimuli by the left than the right hemisphere. In the present article, we present in greater detail our arguments for the effects of forced order of report on the perception of bilaterally presented stimuli and refute Young and Ellis's ibid. criticisms of this proposal.     

Picture and pattern perception in the sighted and the blind: the advantage of the late blind

Two experiments are reported on the contribution of visual experience to tactile perception. In the first experiment, sighted, congenitally blind, and late blind individuals made tactual matches to tangible embossed shapes. In the second experiment, the same subjects attempted tactile identification of raised-line drawings. The three groups did not differ in the accuracy of shape matching, but both groups of blind subjects were much faster than the sighted. Late blind observers were far better than the sighted or congenitally blind at tactile picture identification. Four of the twelve pictures were correctly identified by most of the late blind subjects. The sighted and congenitally blind performed at comparable levels in picture naming. There was no evidence that visual experience alone aided the sighted in the tactile task under investigation, since they performed no better than did the early blind. The superiority of the late blind suggests that visual exposure to drawings and the rules of pictorial representation may help tactile picture identification when combined with a history of tactual experience.     

A size-congruency effect in memory for visual shape

In five experiments, visual shapes were shown at either a small or a large size for study in the learning phase of a recognition memory experiment. Later, in the test phase, recognition memory was tested in anold-new paradigm in which an equal number of new shapes were mixed at random with previously seen shapes. Half of theold shapes were shown at the same size as in the learning phase, whereas half were shown at the other size. In every experiment, shapes tested at the same size as shown in the learning phase were recognized more quickly and more accurately than shapes tested at a different size. This size-congruency effect was found for line drawings of natural objects and for unfamiliar shapes (i.e., blobs and stick figures). Furthermore, the magnitude of the size-congruency effect depended on the degree of discrepancy between the learning size and the test size. Together, the results suggest that visual shape memory can be sensitive to the size at which patterns are originally encoded, and that the speed and accuracy of recognition memory is influenced by the size of a shape.     

The role of object violation in the development of visual analysis

The present study investigated whether sensitivity to object violations in perception as well as in action would vary with age. Five-, 6-, and 11-yr.-old children and adults solved tasks which involved perception only, motoric indication of parts, actual assembly of parts, and drawing of a violated figure. In perception, object violation was the only factor showing change across age groups, with violations being increasingly noticed. In composition tasks involving motor components, object violation was just one factor besides quantity of parts and type of segmentation contributing to task difficulty and showing increase in performance across age groups. Analysis of object violations in visual structure required abilities similar to those needed when analysing shape interference. Improved visual detection and graphic construction of object violation seemed not to occur because segmentation increased quantitatively but more likely because fast perceptual processes came under scrutiny.     

Dissociating location-specific inhibition and attention shifts: Evidence against the disengagement account of contingent capture

The study of attentional capture has provided a rich context for assessing the relative influence of top-down and bottom-up factors in visual perception. Some have argued that attentional capture by a salient, irrelevant stimulus is contingent on top-down attentional set (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 18:1030?C1044, 1992). Others, however, have argued that capture is driven entirely by bottom-up salience and that top-down factors influence the postallocation speed of disengagement from the irrelevant stimulus (e.g., Theeuwes, Acta Psychologica 135:77?C99, 2010a). In support of this speed-of-disengagement hypothesis, recent findings from the modified spatial-cuing paradigm show that cues carrying a no-go target property produce reverse, or negative, cuing effects, consistent with inhibition of the cue location from which attention has been very quickly disengaged (Belopolsky, Schreij, & Theeuwes, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72, 326?C341, 2010). Across six experiments, we show that this inhibitory process can be dissociated from shifts of spatial attention and is, thus, not a reliable marker of capture. We conclude that the data are inconsistent with the predictions of the disengagement hypothesis.     

Symmetry perception in the blind

Bilateral mirror symmetry, especially vertical symmetry, is a powerful phenomenon in spatial organization of visual shapes. However, the causes of vertical symmetry salience in visual perception are not completely clear. Here we investigated whether the perceptual salience of vertical symmetry depends on visual experience by testing a group of congenitally blind individuals in a memory task in which either horizontal or vertical symmetry was used as an incidental feature. Both blind and sighted subjects remembered more accurately configurations that were symmetrical compared to those that were not. Critically, whereas sighted subjects displayed a higher level of facilitation by vertical than horizontal symmetry, no such difference was found in the blind. This suggests that the perceptual salience of the vertical dimension is visually based.