Emergence of Drawing Devices for Total and Partial Occlusion: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

The developmental emergence of two drawing devices was investigated in young children: the use of omission (ie not drawing any of a hidden object) to depict total occlusion and the use of hidden line elimination (HLE, ie deleting only that part of an object that is hidden from view) to depict partial occlusion in a three-dimensional scene. Three groups of school children (5, 6, and 7 years old) were tested individually with two tasks four times over a 2-year period. One task called for the omission device (to draw a cup with its handle not in view) and the other for the HLE device (to draw one ball behind and partially occluded by another). The stimuli in each task were presented in pairs, with one member of the pair showing the occluded scene and the other a canonical or not-occluded scene. Changes in the strategies used by the children to indicate the visual differences within the pairs were recorded over the four testing sessions. Children were found to use the omission device more readily with the cup task than the HLE device with the ball task. There was an age-related trend in every task in the use of the drawing device appropriate to that task. For those who did not use the drawing device appropriate for a perspective drawing, there was a tendency for each age group to favour a particular strategy for representation. The advantage of using a longitudinal design to chart the developmental trend of the emergence of these two drawing devices is discussed.

Effects of different emotion terms on the size and colour of children's drawings

“…While some aspects of children's drawings may indeed be influenced merely by the provision of a single contrast (Cox, 1981(Cox, , 1985Chen & Holman, 1989;Davis, 1983Davis, , 1985aDavis, , 1985bLewis, Russell & Berridge, 1993), the present study clearly shows that the children marked "nice" and "happy" differently in their drawings, and "nasty" and "sad" differently, implying that they were responding on the basis of the specific emotion terms provided, not merely to the provision of a binary contrast per se.…”

Fine motor skills and motor control networking in developmental age

“…Looking at the underlying factors of increased accuracy, we refer to Simpson et al (2017), who suggested that inhibition is the key ability that enables children to draw recognizable objects. Inhibition may be evoked, for instance, when stopping drawing a line of overlapping figures (hidden line elimination) (e.g., Chen & Holman, 1989; Lange‐Küttner, 2000). This possible inhibition requirement was here particularly evident in boys, although further research should confirm this finding with a study designed to discriminate slow vs fast tasks.…”

Drawing Development: From Similarity of Features to Direction

“…Conversely, drawing can be done "from memory," which makes it more difficult to get a particular orientation correct. Chen and Holman (1989) presented pairs of objects with a carefully chosen contrasting feature, relevant to overlap. Children as young as 5 years of age use aspects of projection in these conditions, and with some objects more than others.…”