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Development and differentiation in children's figure drawings
Author(s) -
Silk Angèle M. J.,
Thomas Glyn V.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1986.tb02206.x
Subject(s) - psychology , orientation (vector space) , face (sociological concept) , developmental psychology , linguistics , mathematics , geometry , philosophy
Children, aged between 3 1/2 and 6 1/2 years old, were each asked to make a drawing of a man and a dog. The drawings were scored in terms of their relative sizes, orientation and the numbers of common features, human features and dog features portrayed. The total number of features increased with increasing age, as did the proportions of distinguishing features. The lack of differentiation by younger children was due both to the absence of distinguishing features in both drawings, and to the inclusion of human features in their dog drawing. Even in the youngest age group, however, the dog drawing included more dog features than did the man drawing. These results support the hypothesis that first drawings of an animal are often adaptations of the child's scheme for a human figure. Older children increasingly adopted canonical orientations for their drawings (full‐face vertical man, profile horizontal animal). There was no significant effect of the order in which the drawings were made, and drawing both figures together on one page resulted in smaller drawings with fewer features. Girls included more features in total, and proportionally more human features, in their drawings than did boys.