Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Basic executive constraints in drawing
- 2 Maintaining paper contact, anchoring, and planning
- 3 The reproduction of rectilinear figures
- 4 The production of curvilinear forms
- 5 The impact of meaning on executive strategies
- 6 Simple representational drawing
- 7 Difficult graphic tasks: A failure in perceptual analysis?
- 8 Stability and evolution in children's drawings
- 9 Innovations, primitives, contour, and space in children's drawings
- 10 Children's repeated drawings: How are innovations coded?
- 11 The pragmatics of everyday graphic production
- References
- Index
8 - Stability and evolution in children's drawings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Basic executive constraints in drawing
- 2 Maintaining paper contact, anchoring, and planning
- 3 The reproduction of rectilinear figures
- 4 The production of curvilinear forms
- 5 The impact of meaning on executive strategies
- 6 Simple representational drawing
- 7 Difficult graphic tasks: A failure in perceptual analysis?
- 8 Stability and evolution in children's drawings
- 9 Innovations, primitives, contour, and space in children's drawings
- 10 Children's repeated drawings: How are innovations coded?
- 11 The pragmatics of everyday graphic production
- References
- Index
Summary
In drawing, as in spoken language, children's “reception strategies” or understanding of graphics outrun their productive capacities by a substantial margin. Although one might hesitate to characterize children's drawings on the whole as deficient or impoverished, it is reasonable to ask why they do not move more rapidly toward a diverse interpretation of reality in line with their growing sophistication in perceiving and understanding the world.
The possible role of stereotypes
One possible explanation is that graphic inventiveness is restricted by the ubiquity of those public stereotypes that children spontaneously adopt or have forced upon them. Certainly stereotypes and other influences from external models are found in children's drawings, but they are not as pervasive as casual inspection might suggest. Even when children are in close and continuous contact with one another's drawings, there is considerable variety in their representation of even the most common objects. The drawings in Fig. 8.1 are the products of a single class of Australian public school children aged 5.6 to 7 years, drawn on the same day. The variety of forms is striking, and this is typical of much of their drawing. Even when such children do adopt stereotyped formulas, they not infrequently include their own personal versions side by side with the “public” versions, indicating that when stereotypes have been incorporated into a child's repertoire, they do not necessarily monopolize production.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Drawing and CognitionDescriptive and Experimental Studies of Graphic Production Processes, pp. 161 - 173Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1984