Young children's drawings and descriptions of layouts and objects

Agata Bochynska, Moira R. Dillon

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Young children tend to prioritize objects over layouts in their drawings, often juxtaposing “floating” objects in the picture plane instead of grounding those objects in drawn representations of the extended layout. In the present study, we explore whether implicitly directing children's attention to elements of the extended layout through a drawing's communicative goal-to indicate the location of a hidden target to someone else-might lead children to draw more layout information. By comparing children's drawings to a different group of children's verbal descriptions, moreover, we explore how communicative medium affects children's inclusion of layout and object information. If attention modulates children's symbolic communication about layouts and objects, then children should both draw and talk about layouts and objects when they are relevant to the communicative task. If there are challenges or advantages specific to either medium, then children might treat layouts and objects differently when drawing versus describing them. We find evidence for both of these possibilities: Attention affects what children include in symbolic communication, like drawings and language, but children are more concise in their inclusion of relevant layout or object information in language versus drawings.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages3691-3695
Number of pages5
StatePublished - 2022
Event44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: Jul 27 2022Jul 30 2022

Conference

Conference44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period7/27/227/30/22

Keywords

  • child development
  • drawing
  • language
  • layouts
  • objects
  • spatial cognition
  • spatial language

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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