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…

Young children's growing access to touchscreen technology represents one of many contextual factors that may influence development. The focus of the current study was the impact of traditional versus electronic drawing materials on the quality of children's drawings during the preschool years. Young children (2-5 years, N = 73) and a comparison…

Pictures are defined by their creator's intentions and resemblance to their real world referents. Here we examine whether young children follow a realist route (e.g., focusing on how closely pictures resemble their referents) or intentional route (e.g., focusing on what a picture is intended to represent by its artist) when identifying a picture's…

Humans have a strong need to belong. Thus, when signs of ostracism are detected, adults often feel motivated to affiliate with others in order to reestablish their social connections. This study investigated the importance of affiliation to young children following priming with ostracism. Four- and 5-year-old children were primed with either…

Data from a large prospective longitudinal study (n = 1,239) was used to investigate the association between observed sensitive parenting in early childhood and children's representations of family relationships as measured by the Family Drawing Paradigm (FDP) in first grade as well as the extent to which these representations partially mediate…

The current study analyzed figure size modification in different types of spatial context (C. Lange-Kuttner, 1997, 2004) for sequence and practice effects. Children of 7, 9, and 11 years of age, as well as 17-year-olds, drew figures in a series of ready-made spatial axes systems, which (a) logically increased in dimensional complexity as in child…

Two experiments were reported that aimed at investigating the development of spatial analysis of hierarchical patterns in children between 3 and 9 years of age. A total of 108 children participated in the drawing experiment, and 224 children were tested in a force-choice similarity judgment task. In both tasks, participants were exposed to…

Three- to 5-year-old children drew or watched another person draw what the children wrongly thought were the contents of a box. They were then shown the true contents, asked what had been drawn, and asked what they or the other person had thought was in the box. Children were more accurate at recalling drawings than beliefs. (BC)

Tested kindergarten, first-, second-, and third-grade children to determine if other developmental changes in drawings might have obscured an underlying change in the tendency to seriate. (Author/SDH)

This study examined whether 4- to 8-year-olds considered knowledge prerequisites for pretending and drawing. Children were asked if an artist (actor) who did not know what something was, yet whose drawing (behavior) resembled it, was actually drawing it (pretending to be it). Children performed similarly on pretending and drawing questions.…

Examined emergence of a writing system in 4- to 12- year-olds. Found transition occurring around age 6 in which production was more fluent for writing than drawing and activation of one system interfered with the other. Modeling consolidation of both phenomena generated testable parameters for development, involving increasing specialization and…

Investigated Piaget's distinction between the roles of scheme and schema in memory. Proposed that schemas may vary within wide limits while the underlying schemes from which the schemas stem remain stable. Subjects were 78, 6-year-old children. (SDH)

Investigates the problem young children have in constructing diagonals, noting that, on the whole, they can not make diagonals in the horizontal/vertical configuration. (HOD)

Results of this study suggest the feasibility of using concepts from studies of spoken language for experimental studies of graphic performance. (Authors)