Knowledge and Appearance in Children's Pictorial Representation

Abstract

Translate Article

Seven and nine year olds were asked to draw two three‐dimensional objects (a cube and a wedge). When there was disjunction between their knowledge of the object's structure and its appearance (cube), they depicted the invariant rather than the variant features and produced rectangular solutions. When differences between the structure and the appearance of the object were minimised (wedge) most children drew a converging form. They could also accurately copy a two‐dimensional converging form. However, the children's knowledge of what the line drawing was supposed to represent did have an effect: in particular, they drew fewer converging obliques when the same line drawing was called a ‘building block’ (a rectangular object) than when it was called a ‘shape’ or a ‘house’ (an object known to contain obliques). A similar pattern of results was observed in a second experiment in which a selection task was used.