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

1. 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 table.
   2. Ask the child to draw a lollipop and a balloon on two separate sheets of paper.
   3. Ask the child to draw a picture of themselves and a picture of the experimenter on the remaining two sheets of paper.
   4. Alternate the order in which the drawings are created between subjects, so half the children draw the lollipop and balloon first, and half draw themselves and the experimenter first.
   5. Collect all of the child’s drawings and put them aside for approximately 15 min while the child completes the size task and the oddity task.
2. Size task
   1. For this task, create four sets of hand-drawn pictures on separate sheets of paper in advance. Each picture should contain two of the same shapes of unequal sizes (e.g., a large circle and a small circle).
   2. At the start of the task, tell the child: "I am going to show you some pictures drawn by a boy or girl (gender should match the child’s gender) your age who has a broken arm. This child tried really hard to draw good pictures, but because of the broken arm, the pictures did not always come out looking the way they wanted."
   3. After placing the first picture in the child’s view, say: "They drew a picture of a spider and a tree. Would you like to see their picture of a tree and a spider?"
   4. Point to each object in the picture and ask: "What is this?"
   5. If the child is reluctant to respond, repeat the introduction and follow up by asking: "Can you point to a spider? Can you point to a tree?"
   6. Repeat the procedure for three additional item pairs: mouse and elephant, dog and house, and flower and bicycle.
   7. Counterbalance the order of the items in each pair across children and drawings.
   8. Record the child’s responses using audio or video.
3. Oddity task
   1. Immediately follow the size task with the oddity task.
   2. For this task, create four sets of hand-drawn ovals on separate sheets of paper, where one oval has a different orientation than the rest. Place the dissimilar oval in either the second or third position in the series of four.
   3. Tell the child: "I am going to show you some more pictures drawn by the child your age who has a broken arm. They drew a picture of three shoes and one sock. Would you like to see their picture of three shoes and one sock?"
   4. Point to the dissimilar oval and ask: "What is this?"
   5. If the child is reluctant to respond, repeat the introduction and follow up by asking: "Can you point to a sock?"
   6. Repeat this procedure for three additional item pairs: cows and horses, pigs and chickens, and cookies and apples.
   7. Counterbalance the order of the items across children and drawings.
   8. Record the child’s responses using audio or video.
4. Drawing task
   1. Following the size and oddity tasks, retrieve the drawings and say: 'I found the drawings you made earlier. I really enjoyed looking at them. What is this one?" Then present the drawings one by one in random order and record the child’s responses.

2. Analysis

1. Two independent raters code the child’s responses to each question to determine if they were accurate or not. Resolve disagreements through discussion.
2. The dependent variable is the total number of trials (0-4) for each task in which the child described the entire drawing correctly.
3. Analyze whether the child used the artist’s intention to correctly identify the objects in the drawing for each task. To do this, conduct t-tests against chance performance (a score of 2) for each task. Comparisons can also be made across age groups and tasks.