JUDGMENT AND PRODUCTION OF DRAWINGS BY 3-YEAR-OLDS TO 10-YEAR-OLDS - COMPARISON OF DECLARATIVE AND PROCEDURAL DRAWING KNOWLEDGE

In this experiment, 80 children between the ages of three and ten prod uced and judged drawings of a person and a house. Two alternative hypo theses were tested. Under the first hypothesis, young children have in ternal models of persons and objects which are comparable to those of adults, but they have problems implementing their knowledge and planni ng and managing the graphic activity. If this hypothesis is true, we s hould obtain an interaction between age and type of task (production v s. judgement). Under the second hypothesis, children's drawings are a direct reflection of their internal models of the items drawn. This hy pothesis predicted a significant positive correlation between performa nce on production and judgement. In the judgement task, the subjects w ere presented with pairs of drawings and asked to indicate the more el aborate drawing. For the house and the man drawing, children by the ag e of three were able to correctly determine the most elaborate of the two presented drawings. A strong interaction was obtained between age and type of task (production or judgement), due to the fact that the d ifference between production performance and judgement performance dec reases with age. The discussion suggests a limited cognitive capacity hypothesis to account for the results, and proposes some possibilities for future studies.