CONSTRAINTS ON REPRESENTATIONAL CHANGE - DRAWING A MAN WITH 2 HEADS

The sequences of actions by which children make drawings of familiar t opics have been taken to exemplify their internal representations of p rocedural knowledge. In four experiments we tested Karmiloff-Smith's ( 1992) claim that preschool children represent such knowledge as sequen tially fixed lists by examining the extent to which they could vary th eir usual routine for drawing a picture of a man by adding a second he ad. Participants were mainly white, lower middle-class boys and girls, aged 3 years to 9 years,living in the suburbs of a large city. We fou nd more flexibility on this task than has previously been claimed and evidence that misconstrual of the task may account for some children a ppearing inflexible in previous studies. Nevertheless, a substantial n umber of young children did display a degree of inflexibility that was (1) relatively stable over time, (2) hard to account for in terms of misunderstanding of the task, and (3) not simply unwillingness to atte mpt novel drawings. Furthermore, this inflexibility was unrelated to d rawing style within age groups, but declined with increasing age. Whil e this apparent inflexibility could be interpreted as a consequence of internal cognitive constraints, it could also be explained as an atte mpt to maintain a symmetrical composition. We conclude, therefore, tha t the currently available data provide only qualified support for the operation of internal constraints on the flexibility of sequences of s killed actions.