Children's Reliance on Artist Intentions When Identifying Pictures

Source: Laboratories of Judith Danovitch and Nicholaus Noles—University of Louisville

Children are not the best artists. Sometimes it’s easy to pick out the characteristic triangular head, whiskers, and tail of a cat, but children often describe elaborate scenarios that they depict as a beautifully unrecognizable mess. Thus, given children’s questionable artistic talent, how do they know what their drawings, and the drawings of others, represent? One way children identify pictures is by relying on resemblance. If it looks like a cat, then it’s a cat. However, some pictures do not clearly resemble any real object. In this situation, children must use other means to figure out what the picture represents, including their understanding of what the person who created the picture intended it to represent.

By their first birthday, children are sensitive to the intentions of other people. They know that people’s actions are driven by their goals, and they can infer a person’s intentions even if the goal-directed action is not successful (e.g., they understand a person struggling to turn a lid intends to open a jar, even if they never see them succeed in opening it). By about age 3, children can use this understanding of intention to guide their interpretation of drawings and other pictorial representations. They apply this understanding both to identifying their own drawings, and to interpreting drawings created by another person.

This experiment demonstrates how to measure children’s use of intention to interpret otherwise ambiguous pictures based on the methods developed by Bloom and Markson.¹

Recruit 3- and 4-year-old children. Participants should have no history of developmental disorders and have normal hearing and vision. For the purposes of this demonstration, only one child is tested. Larger sample sizes (as in the Bloom and Markson study¹) are recommended when conducting any experiments.

1. Data collection

Drawing task: Part 1
1. Prepare a crayon and four sheets of blank paper. Invite the child into the room and have them sit at a tab

Researchers tested 24 4-year-olds and found that 4-year-old children correctly identified 87% of the pictures in the drawing task (Figure 1). They also identified 83% of the pictures correctly in the size task and 68% of the pictures in the oddity task. All of these results were significantly better than chance at the p < 0.05 level. The researchers also tested 24 3-year-olds and found that they identified 76% of the pictures in the drawing task and 69% of the pictures in the size task correct

Pictures and drawings are symbols, and the ability to identify what a symbol represents is important for the development of a wide range of skills. As early as age 3, children realize that understanding the intentions of a drawing’s creator can allow them to identify a drawing that might otherwise be unidentifiable. Moreover, children as young as age 3 can do this even if the drawing bears no resemblance to the intended object. Although appearance and shape are certainly still valuable for identifying pictorial re