The Use of Communication Tasks to Investigate Depiction of Spatial Relationships in Young Children’s Drawings

Abstract

Even psychologists who know very little about the study of children’s drawings will probably be familiar with Luquet’s (1927) proposition that such drawings are initially marked by ‘intellectual realism’, where the child ‘draws what he knows’, and only later become visually realistic. However, while this distinction has stood the test of time quite well, it is clear that the young child does not represent in his drawings all that he knows about the objects drawn, and nor does the older child draw all that he sees. The present paper is concerned with the question of what information children do and do not encode in their drawings, and with the factors governing this selectivity.