Partial occlusion in young children's drawings

Abstract

Numerous investigators have reported that attempts to represent the occlusion of a farther object by a nearer one are infrequent in young children's drawings. However, Cox (1981, Educational Psychology, 1 275–287) found that most 6 year olds used partial occlusion to represent a robber trying unsuccessfully to hide from a policeman behind a wall. The present paper reports three experiments involving 300 six-year-old children. The first experiment showed that, while Cox's findings are replicable, the preponderance of partial occlusion responses remains even when the “cops and robbers” storyline is omitted and even when the robber is replaced by a simple column of Lego bricks. The second experiment showed that either reducing the height of the column or replacing it with a second wall reduces the frequency of partial occlusions. However, the separate representation of the two elements remains infrequent. In Experiment 3, replacing the walls with blocks as well as eliciting drawings in color increased the prevalence of such “separate” drawings. Results are interpreted in terms of the constraints operating on the representation of particular objects in particular orientations and in terms of the cues which may influence the way in which the child construes the task.