Previous research shows that the development of response inhibition and drawing skill are linked. The current research investigated whether this association reflects a more fundamental link between response inhibition and motor control. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds (n = 100) were tested on measures of inhibition, fine motor control, and…

This meta-analysis, spanning 5 decades of Draw-A-Scientist studies, examined U.S. children's gender-science stereotypes linking science with men. These stereotypes should have weakened over time because women's representation in science has risen substantially in the United States, and mass media increasingly depict female scientists. Based on 78…

The study examined the etiology of individual differences in early drawing and of its longitudinal association with school mathematics. Participants (N = 14,760), members of the Twins Early Development Study, were assessed on their ability to draw a human figure, including number of features, symmetry, and proportionality. Human figure drawing was…

This study investigated the spatial analysis of tactile hierarchical patterns in 110 early-blind children aged 6-8 to 16-18 years, as compared to 90 blindfolded sighted children, in a naming and haptic drawing task. The results revealed that regardless of visual status, young children predominantly produced local responses in both tasks, whereas…

A. Karmiloff-Smith's (1990) task of drawing a nonexistent object is considered to be a measure of cognitive flexibility. The notion of earlier emergence of cognitive flexibility in bilingual children motivated the current researchers to request 4- and 5-year-old English-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew bilingual children and their monolingual peers to…

Distinctiveness effects in children's (5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds) false memory illusions were examined using visual materials. In Experiment 1, developmental trends (increasing false memories with age) were obtained using Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists presented as words and color photographs but not line drawings. In Experiment 2, when items were…

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 intervention study tested whether invented spelling plays a causal role in learning to read. Three groups of kindergarten children (mean age = 5 years 7 months) participated in a 4-week intervention. Children in the invented-spelling group spelled words as best they could and received developmentally appropriate feedback. Children in the 2…

Three experiments used adults' performances in a category abstraction paradigm to test for the existence of individual style in the drawings of three five-year-olds. Overall, studies provided experimental support for the notion that young children possess recognizable artistic styles. (MP)

In a study of drawing development, children's and adults' drawings of cubes were classified into drawing types. Differences between children's and adults' drawings suggest that younger children use a similarity geometry with feature-based criteria, whereas older children and adults use a vantage-point geometry that includes direction-based…

This study was undertaken to investigate (1) the findings of an exploratory study in which the Luquet-Piaget sequence of drawing was tentatively confirmed in children's drawings of a house with a tree behind it, (2) the relationship of house-tree task with selected Piagetian and two psychometric measures, and (3) synchronous development among…

In two experiments, children and adults made judgments about drawings of a person walking or running. The drawings varied according to whether action lines, background lines, or no lines were present. Seven and nine year olds offered equivalent judgments of action and background lines, whereas adults distinguished between these devices. (BC)

Solicited 6- to 10-year olds' and adults' perceptually ambiguous drawings to which two different meanings could be attributed. Analyzed movement sequences to determine whether movements were modified in ways determined by the model's meaning. Found that drawing was sensitive to meaning at all ages. Sensitivity differed as a function of the model…

Examined the likelihood of changes in various parts of children's drawings of people when the children were asked to represent action. (Author/JMB)