Organizing principle in 4-to 8-year-old children's drawings of embedded geometric shapes

This study looks at the way children aged 4 to 8 organize the execution of three drawings composed of simple geometric shapes (a circle, a rectangle o r square, a triangle, and a diamond). In the first two experiments, we anal yze the execution process used to copy and draw from memory, and we attempt to determine how this process evolves with age. The results showed that th e "centripetal" execution order, where subjects drew the shapes in the outs ide-to-inside direction, was already prevalent in 4-year-olds. The third ex periment was aimed at assessing the frequency and stability of this drawing process. We superimposed transparencies of simple geometric shapes in fron t of the subject's eyes. The results showed that the order in which the sha pes were presented had an effect on the drawing process and how it evolved with age. They also showed that the centripetal execution principle had sta bilized by the age of 8. The centripetal execution principle appears to act like the syntactic rules in the action grammar that governs elementary fig ure drawing.