Reconsidering the scribbling stage of drawing: a new perspective on toddlers' representational processes

Abstract

Although the scribbling stage of drawing has been historically regarded as meaningless and transitional, a sort of prelude to the “actual” drawing phase of childhood, recent studies have begun to re-evaluate this important moment of a child's development and find meaning in what was once considered mere motor activity and nothing more. The present study analyzes scribbling in all its subphases and discovers a clear intention behind young children's gestures. From expressing the dynamic qualities of an object and the child's relationship with it, to gradually reducing itself to a simple contour of a content no more “alive” on the paper, but only in the child's own imagination, we trace the evolution of the line as a tool that toddlers use to communicate feelings and intentions to the world that surrounds them. We will provide a selected number of graphical examples that are representative of our theory. These drawings (13 in total) were extracted from a much wider sample derived from our studies on children's graphical-pictorial abilities, conducted on children aged 0–3 years in various Italian nurseries. Our results appear to indicate that scribbling evolves through a series of stages, and that early graphical activity in children is sparked and maintained by their relationship with their caregivers and the desire to communicate with them.

New indices to characterize drawing behavior in humans (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

“…Other studies acknowledge that the development of drawing follows a linear trajectory towards realism and that a child's spontaneous fortuitous realism eventually evolves into representative drawings 16 . However, more recent studies tend to show evidence of pre-representative activities during scribbling 14,17 .…”

“…Consisting of two lines (legs) attached to a round form (head), the tadpole figure arises around 3 years of age 11 and is observed in Western as well in non-Western countries 12,13 . Thus, in the same way that children reorganize their spoken language to communicate efficiently, the appearance of these first recognizable drawings also allows them to be better understood by others 14 . An adult can easily understand what a 4-year-old child wanted to represent when they drew, because the outlined objects are recognizable.…”

“…Although the loops, lines and stipples of a scribble usually have no sense for an adult, can we presume that it has no meaning for the young child? Like the young Saint-Exupéry, who complained that adults did not understand his drawing of an elephant eaten by a snake and that “they always need to have things explained”, Longobardi 14 argues that the inability to detect representativeness in children’s scribbles may be explained by the limitation of adults’ interpretations rather than the absence of this intentionality. In this case, the representativeness of a drawing, namely its concrete and figurative character, would result from the perspectives of two individuals: the entity who produces it (here, a child) and an outside observer who evaluates it (here, an adult).…”

Learning of Central Pattern Generator Coordination in Robot Drawing

“…Unlike previously proposed algorithms for robot drawing, each line in the task space is represented by only one action in the joint space, which explains the smoothness of the obtained drawing. The proposed drawing scenario is supported by studies on scribbling stage of drawing during the human development (Gardner, 1982 ; Quaglia et al, 2015 ), which also inspired the animation studies in computer graphics (Noris et al, 2012 ). In this study, plateau patterns are used at the joint space to draw straight lines at the task space.…”

Tell Us About It: Children's Expressive Narratives About Head Start

“…Another example of a study that highlights children's ability to actively participate in research is provided by Longobardi, Quaglia & Lotti (2015). Longobardi disputed that children's scribbles are a type of precursor to "actual" drawing and that they have particular meanings to the children.…”