Conflict between canonicality and array‐specificity in young children's drawings

Abstract

Previous research on young children's drawings has typically studied children's representation of individual objects quite separately from their representation of the spatial relationships between objects in a scene. This paper reports two experiments which explored the relationship between these two aspects of graphic representation. In particular it looks at the problem posed to children in depicting an array of familiar objects with canonical (or stereotyped) orientations which conflict with the way children typically represent within‐array spatial relationships. Four‐seven‐year‐old children were presented with two‐object arrays with one object placed behind the other and in which the orientation of each object was also varied. There were three main findings. First, children's concern to draw a familiar object in its canonical orientation tended to override their concern for depicting between‐object spatial relationships. Second, different array presentations resulted in significant differences in the number of children who drew their own view of the array. Lastly, both these findings were subject to a paradoxical U‐shaped developmental age trend.