Representational flexibility in children’s drawings: effects of age and verbal instructions

This study aims to investigate representational and syntactical flexibility in children’s drawing behaviour, and the extent to which changes introduced at both representational and syntactical levels are related to age or can be induced by contextual manipulations. A Deletion task required three age groups of 5-, 7- and 9-year-old children to draw objects that had been rendered partially invisible, thanks to magic transformations. Two different verbal instructions about what was to remain visible in the objects, and two different objects, one regularly and one non-regularly drawn, were designed to investigate contextual sensitivity in children’s representational and syntactical behaviour respectively. The results provided evidence for sequential-like developments with regard to both representational and syntactical flexibility in children. The extent to which the procedural constraints of drawing prevented representational flexibility to be expressed was investigated in a second experiment, in which the deletions were performed by means of an eraser on pre-printed 2D line drawings. The results showed that the expression of representational flexibility across ages did not fundamentally change as a function of the load imposed by the procedural constraints.