An official website of the United States government
Young children tend to prioritize objects over layouts in their drawings, often juxtaposing “floating” objects in the picture plane instead of grounding those objects in drawn representations of the extended layout. In the present study, we explore whether implicitly directing children’s attention to elements of the extended layout through a drawing’s communicative goal—to indicate the location of a hidden target to someone else—might lead children to draw more layout information. By comparing children’s drawings to a different group of children’s verbal descriptions, moreover, we explore how communicative medium affects children’s inclusion of layout and object information. If attention modulates children’s symbolic communication about layouts and objects, then children should both draw and talk about layouts and objects when they are relevant to the communicative task. If there are challenges or advantages specific to either medium, then children might treat layouts and objects differently when drawing versus describing them. We find evidence for both of these possibilities: Attention affects what children include in symbolic communication, like drawings and language, but children are more concise in their inclusion of relevant layout or object information in language versus drawings.
more »
« less
Pictorial depth cues in young children’s drawings of layouts and objects.
Humans have been faced with the challenges of pictorial production since at least the Paleolithic. Curiously, while the capacity to navigate layouts and recognize objects in everyday life comes almost effortlessly, inherited from our evolutionary past, the capacity to draw layouts and objects is more effortful, often needing time to improve over the course of an individual’s development and with the technological innovations acquired through culture. The present study examines whether young children might nevertheless rely on phylogenetically ancient spatial capacities for navigation and object recognition when creating uniquely human pictorial art. We apply a novel digital coding technique to a publicly available dataset of young children’s drawings of layouts and objects to explore children’s use of classic pictorial depth cues including size, position, and overlap. To convey pictorial depth, children appear to adopt several cues, without a preference among them, younger than had been suggested by previous studies that used other, less rich, analytic techniques. Moreover, children use more cues to pictorial depth in drawings of layouts versus objects. Children’s creation of uniquely human pictorial symbols may thus reflect their heightened use of depth for navigating layouts compared to recognizing objects, both cognitive capacities that humans share with other animals.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1845924
- PAR ID:
- 10220400
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
- ISSN:
- 1069-7977
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
How do children’s representations of object categories change as they grow older? As they learn about the world around them, they also express what they know in the drawings they make. Here, we examine drawings as a window into how children represent familiar object categories, and how this changes across childhood. We asked children (age 3-10 years) to draw familiar object categories on an iPad. First, we analyzed their semantic content, finding large and consistent gains in how well children could produce drawings that are recognizable to adults. Second, we quantified their perceptual similarity to adult drawings using a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network, allowing us to visualize the representational layout of object categories across age groups using a common feature basis. We found that the organization of object categories in older children’s drawings were more similar to that of adults than younger children’s drawings. This correspondence was strong in the final layers of the neural network, showing that older children’s drawings tend to capture the perceptual features critical for adult recognition. We hypothesize that this improvement reflects increasing convergence between children’s representations of object categories and that of adults; future work will examine how these age-related changes relate to children’s developing perceptual and motor capacities. Broadly, these findings point to drawing as a rich source of insight into how children represent object concepts.more » « less
-
How do children’s visual concepts change across childhood, and how might these changes be reflected in their drawings? Here we investigate developmental changes in children’s ability to emphasize the relevant visual distinctions between object categories in their drawings. We collected over 13K drawings from children aged 2-10 years via a free-standing drawing station in a children’s museum. We hypothesized that older children would produce more recognizable drawings, and that this gain in recognizability would not be entirely explained by concurrent development in visuomotor control. To measure recognizability, we applied a pretrained deep convolutional neural network model to extract a high-level feature representation of all drawings, and then trained a multi-way linear classifier on these features. To measure visuomotor control, we developed an automated procedure to measure their ability to accurately trace complex shapes. We found consistent gains in the recognizability of drawings across ages that were not fully explained by children’s ability to accurately trace complex shapes. Furthermore, these gains were accompanied by an increase in how distinct different object categories were in feature space. Overall, these results demonstrate that children’s drawings include more distinctive visual features as they grow older.more » « less
-
Abstract How do drawings—ranging from detailed illustrations to schematic diagrams—reliably convey meaning? Do viewers understand drawings based on how strongly they resemble an entity (i.e., as images) or based on socially mediated conventions (i.e., as symbols)? Here we evaluate a cognitive account of pictorial meaning in which visual and social information jointly support visual communication. Pairs of participants used drawings to repeatedly communicate the identity of a target object among multiple distractor objects. We manipulated social cues across three experiments and a full replication, finding that participants developed object-specific and interaction-specific strategies for communicating more efficiently over time, beyond what task practice or a resemblance-based account alone could explain. Leveraging model-based image analyses and crowdsourced annotations, we further determined that drawings did not drift toward “arbitrariness,” as predicted by a pure convention-based account, but preserved visually diagnostic features. Taken together, these findings advance psychological theories of how successful graphical conventions emerge.more » « less
-
All children, including emergent multilingual learners (EMLs), are primed to engage with science from an early age. Yet preschool educators traditionally have not been offered in-depth professional learning (PL) in science, how to teach it effectively to young EMLs, and how to communicate its importance to families. This quasi-experimental study investigated a partnership model designed to engage early educators, children’s families, informal science educators, and STEM role models at an informal science learning environment (ISLE)in collaboratively supporting high-quality science experiences for young EML children at school, at home, and in the community. The study examined the effects of a multi-faceted PL program on educators’ beliefs and attitudes toward science and their classroom instructional practices. Caregivers were surveyed and interviewed to assess their beliefs and attitudes around early science learning. Results indicated that educators in the treatment condition gained confidence in supporting science with EMLs and showed significant increases in instructional quality relative to comparison classrooms. Caregivers rated themselves as more confident in supporting science with their children. Promoting partnerships between preschools and ISLEs can be an effective way to power up educators’ and families’ capacities to activate young EMLs’ science inquiry, learning, and language development across multiple contexts.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
