Young Children's Depiction of Contrast in Human Figure Drawing: standing and walking

Abstract

Children aged 4 to 10 years old were asked to draw a person standing absolutely still and a person walking very fast so that someone not present would know from the pictures alone what had been depicted. Even at four some children were able to convey the difference to a viewer and there was increasing success with age. The number of differentiating cues increased with age and there was an age‐related trend in the order in which specific cues appeared in the drawings. The ability of the children to respond flexibly to the task gives no support to notions of rigid mental representations determining what young children can draw. It is argued that contrast tasks are a useful tool for investigating problem solving skills in the domain of drawing and could be used to extend children's skill by providing an occasion for explicit dialogue about how representational information is conveyed to a viewer.