ELICITING PARTIAL OCCLUSIONS IN THE DRAWINGS OF 4-YEAR-OLDS AND 5-YEAR-OLDS

When asked to depict a partially occluded scene, children as young as 4 or 5 years normally draw two complete and separate objects (intellec tual realism). The manwall hiding task is one exception, in which thes e children make more attempts at visual realism. Four- and 5-year-olds were given a standard task, followed by a hiding task and then the st andard task again. Both age groups drew visually realistic pictures in the hiding task. The 5-year-olds but not the 4-year-olds were able to generalize their attempts at visual realism to their second attempt a t the standard task. A second group of children who received the stand ard task, followed by another version of the standard task and then th e standard task again, did not draw in a visually realistic way. In or der to disentangle an explanation in terms of the notion of hiding fro m one based on the dissimilarity of the two objects in the hiding task , a third group of children received a dissimilar scene (but with no h iding component) between the two standard tasks. Most of these childre n did not draw in a visually realistic way, indicating that the notion of hiding conveyed in the hiding task is the main explanation for its success in eliciting visually realistic responses.