Triangle Wheels and a Ghost in a Girl's Skirt: Young children's representations of unreality

Abstract

Because young children's drawings of people often rely on stereotyped routines, some previous experiments have looked at how they approach the novel task of drawing people who 'could not exist'. The two studies reported here extend previous research by also recording the children's comments, by varying the subject of the drawing and by changing the social context of the task. The results show that, under these different conditions, 4- and 5-year-olds can produce unexpectedly mature and inventive solutions, offering insights not only into the way they draw, but also into the ways they actually think about such unusual problems.