Laterality and visuospatial strategies among young children: A novel 3D-2D transcription task

ABSTRACT

Recent findings showed that children, like adults, exhibit directional biases leading to asymmetrical drawings. This appears to be the result of a complex interaction between several biological, motoric, and cultural factors. We created a drawing task designed to investigate the influence of laterality (i.e., hemispherical functional specialization and handedness) and sex on children’s graphical asymmetries. This task consists of transcribing a symmetrical three-dimensional landscape model to a two-dimensional representation. Sixty-six French pre-school children, aged between 5 and 6 years, were asked to undertake the 3D-2D transcription task, as well as the classical Alter’s directionality task. The novel task exhibited higher sensitivity than the Alter’s directionality test when examining the spatial biases resulting from handedness, and sex. Specific drawing patterns related to these variables were identified. These results suggest that, in addition to the influence of biomechanical factors and handedness, sex plays a role in children’s early graphomotor development. They also support the influence of laterality as a key factor underlying early directional biases.

KEYWORDS:

• Lateralization
• hemispherical functional specialization
• handedness
• sex
• visuospatial patterns

Acknowledgments

The present work was financially supported by the Grand-Est Region (Alsace, France) via the LATERALCOG project. The authors wish to gratefully thank Elodie Ernst and Chloé Neumann for their help in collecting the data, and Laurence de Lussy-Kubisa for his assistance. We would like also to thank Dr. Nic Badcock and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study and the scoring walkthrough of the 3D/2D task are openly available in OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2TQXH.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grand-Est Region (Alsace, France) [18P07546 – 18_GE4_066 – LATERALCOG].