Research into haptic picture perception has mostly concerned adult participants, and little is known about haptic picture perception in visually impaired and sighted children. In the present study, we compared 13 visually impaired children (early blind and low vision) aged 9-10 years and 13 agematched blindfolded sighted children on their ability…

A growing number of schools are embracing new mobile technologies, such as iPads, with little (or no) prior empirical proof of their usability. We investigated whether iPads, which allow children to write and draw with their fingers without the need of a pen, are relevant devices for drawing activities at elementary school. A within-participants…

This study compares the ability of children aged from 6 to 11 to freely produce emotional labels based on detailed scenarios (labelling task), and their ability to depict basic emotions in their human figure drawing (subsequent drawing task). This comparison assesses the relevance of the use of a human figure drawing task in order to test…

The present experiments were aimed at testing Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) assumption that representational flexibility in drawing behavior requires the relaxation of a sequential constraint. A total of two hundred and forty 5- to 9-year-old children produced cross-category drawings (e.g., a house with wings) in 4 conditions. The results indicated…

This study aimed at specifying the content of the representational redescription (RR) process assumed by Karmiloff-Smith (1992) with respect to the emergence of inter-representational flexibility in children's drawing behaviour. We hypothesized that the RR process included part-whole decomposition processes that are essential to the ability to…

In a between-subjects design, 4-to 6-year-olds were asked to draw from three-dimensional (3D) models, two-and-a-half-dimensional (212D) models with or without depth cues, or two-dimensional (2D) models of a familiar object (a saucepan) in noncanonical orientations (handle at the back or at the front). Results showed that canonical errors were…

We investigated the nature of graphic formulas in 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children when they were asked to draw a house and a television in a free condition, and then to draw from photographs of these objects. Assuming that the frequency of occurrence of a feature in children's drawings reflects its semantic weight, we studied the relations between…