According to a new study from Stanford University, the ability i children's drawings that depict objects and recognize the drawings of others improves simultaneously during childhood.
The study was published in Nature Communications.
Children's drawings: here's why they are important
The researchers used machine learning algorithms to analyze changes in a large sample of children's drawings between the ages of 2 and 10.
The study, conducted by researchers Bria Long, Judith Fan, Holly Huey, Zixian Chai and Michael Frank, found that children's ability to draw and recognize objects develop in parallel. It was also found that not all of the improvement in drawing recognizability in childhood could be attributed to improved drawing skill or the inclusion of stereotypical attributes, such as high ears on a rabbit.
“The kinds of features that make older children's drawings recognizable do not appear to be driven by a single feature that all older children learn to include in their drawings,” said Judith Fan, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California. School of Letters and Science and principal investigator of the Cognitive Tools Lab. “It's something much more complex that these machine learning systems are detecting.”
Using machine learning allowed the researchers to interpret the large sample of drawings in this study and highlight subtleties that helped them understand how children perceive the world and how they communicate those perceptions through drawing.
To conduct the study, the researchers collaborated with staff members at the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose to install a kiosk inside the museum. The kiosk displayed recorded video instructions from the study's first author, Bria Long, a Stanford postdoctoral psychology researcher, asking children to draw certain animals or objects.
After receiving the request, children using the kiosk will have 30 seconds to draw the object using their fingertip on a digital tablet. Children using the kiosk were also asked to identify objects drawn by other children in a guessing game and to trace the objects shown on the screen to assess their motor skills.
After collecting approximately 37,000 individual children's drawings from the kiosk, the researchers used machine learning algorithms to analyze the recognizability of each drawing. Then, the researchers collected data on the distinct parts of the object in each image in about 2,000 drawings, annotated by adult participants who were asked to describe which part of the object the children had drawn with each pen stroke (e.g., “head” or “tail”).
“Scientists have been interested in children's drawings for a long time,” Long said, referring to previous studies on how children draw recognizable objects. “But this is the first time we've been able to combine digital drawings with innovations in machine learning to analyze drawings at scale during development.”
The researchers hope that future work in this area will include similar studies across different cultural groups, in both children and adults.
This large-scale work adds solid support to previous findings that as children grow, their ability to recognize and draw animals and objects increases. The fact that the analysis evaluated such a sizable set of drawings allowed the researchers to draw more nuanced conclusions than in previous studies, in which far fewer drawings were analyzed by humans.
Although the recognizability of children's drawings increased with age, the researchers found that the increase was not fully explained by improvements in motor control. Even distinctive features that children learn to recognize and include in their drawings over time, such as a spider's eight legs, do not fully explain the increase.
This suggests that children's improvement in drawings over time reflects not only what they directly observe or are able to produce, but also a change in how they think about objects.
“Children's drawings reflect not only their ability to draw, but something about what they know about these objects,” Long said. “And you see these changes both in their ability to produce these drawings and also to recognize other children's drawings.”
According to researchers, even unrecognizable drawings can convey clues about the child's intentions. For example, a drawing of a tiger may not be recognizable as a tiger, but it is still clearly an animal. The children were also able to convey information about the actual size of the drawing subject, even if the drawing itself was otherwise mysterious.
” Children's drawings contain a lot of detailed information about what they know. And we think this is a really interesting way to learn about what kids think,” Long said. “Just because your child doesn't draw something really well doesn't mean he isn't expressing interesting knowledge about that category.
Children's drawings can help identify talents early
The potential talents of children with gifted characteristics are not always seen in traditional education. Children's drawings, however, can play a role in the early identification of their needs and talents, argues psychologist Sven Mathijssen in his thesis entitled “Back to the drawing board: potential indicators of talent in drawings of human figures”.
Mathijssen's thesis provides evidence of the possibility that children's drawings of human figures may aid in the early identification of children whose talents may not fully develop in mainstream education. Among other things, Mathijssen analyzed the drawings of 206 children aged 4 to 6 years.
Two years after the drawings were made, the parents were asked if the children had had any educational changes. Based on the responses, two groups were created: children who had received enriched education and children who had received regular education.
Statistical analyzes showed that whether or not children had “special characteristics”—characteristics that were tracked only or more often by children who received an enriched education—predicted about 70% well whether children would receive a enriched education or regular education.
However, this was only true for 4- and 5-year-olds. For 6-year-olds this was not the case, partly due to the small number of 6-year-olds involved in the study.
There are practical benefits to using children's drawings as a screening tool. To discover children's talents, psychological tests are often carried out, but they are often very time-consuming, expensive and not possible for everyone.
According to him, a good screening tool works like a sieve: “You can ask all children to draw, without it costing much time or money. Children also often draw on their own from an early age. Therefore, they do not easily shy away from a drawing task. If certain things stand out in a child's drawing, this may be a reason to keep an eye on that child's academic progress.
This indication still says nothing about the potential talents and educational needs of the individual child. To determine exactly what these children need in school, further research needs to be conducted, for example through psychological tests.
Mathijssen says: “We therefore advised industry professionals against using sign IQ for signaling purposes and instead analyze children's drawings of item-level menus for possible indicators of talent.” Mathijssen hopes that other researchers will join him in developing this thesis to develop the intended screening tool.
The importance of children's drawings on nature
When asked to draw local wildlife, 401 UK schoolchildren aged between 7 and 11 most commonly drew mammals and birds, while amphibians and reptiles appeared in the fewest drawings, suggesting imbalances in ecological awareness of children. Kate Howlett and Edgar Turner of the University of Cambridge, UK, present these findings in the open access journal PLOS ONE.
Previous research has shown that, overall, European and North American children's access to green spaces has declined in recent decades and they are becoming increasingly disconnected from nature. Access to green spaces is associated with better cognitive function in children, and disconnection from nature may reduce children's future support for conservation.
To deepen their understanding of children's connection to nature, Howlett and Turner asked 401 children aged between seven and 11 from 12 schools in England to draw and label the animals that live in their gardens and parks near their homes. The researchers then analyzed the different types and specificities of wildlife depicted in the children's drawings.
The analysis showed that mammals – such as squirrels, cats and hedgehogs – appeared in 80.5% of the drawings, more often than any other type of animal. Birds were the second most common type, present in 68.6% of the drawings. Insects and other invertebrates were less common, while amphibians and reptiles were less common, appearing in 15.7% of drawings. Although the children were not asked to draw plants, plants appeared in 91.3% of the children's drawings.
The children were more specific in drawing mammals and birds, most of these animals being identifiable species. Among animals, insects, reptiles, amphibians, and other invertebrates were less often identifiable as species. Of the plants, trees and crops, such as strawberries, potatoes and carrots, were the most identifiable.
Based on findings from children's drawings, the researchers suggest that children's ecological awareness focuses on mammals and birds. Further analysis suggested that ecological awareness might be linked more strongly to domestic or cultural influences, rather than attending a state-funded versus private school.
The researchers call for broad efforts to increase ecological awareness through the adaptation of national school curricula and the expansion of green spaces in schools.
The authors add: “Children's perceptions of the local wildlife with which they share their local gardens and parks are skewed towards mammals and birds. Not only do children draw mammals and birds more often than they draw invertebrates, amphibians or reptiles, but they are also able to identify them more accurately than smaller, less charismatic groups.”
“While this is perhaps unsurprising, given that it mirrors similar biases in broader media and culture, biases in children's perceptions of the natural world suggest a broader problem of nature's disconnection and ecological knowledge attrition, and suggest that we need to re-address these prejudices as an urgent matter.”
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