Making drawings speak through mathematical metrics

Figurative drawing is a skill that takes time to learn, and evolves during different childhood phases that begin with scribbling and end with representational drawing. Between these phases, it is difficult to assess when and how children demonstrate intentions and representativeness in their drawings. The marks produced are increasingly goal-oriented and efficient as the child’s skills progress from scribbles to figurative drawings. Pre-figurative activities provide an opportunity to focus on drawing processes. We applied fourteen metrics to two different datasets (N = 65 and N = 345) to better understand the intentional and representational processes behind drawing, and combined these metrics using principal component analysis (PCA) in different biologically significant dimensions. Three dimensions were identified: efficiency based on spatial metrics, diversity with colour metrics, and temporal sequentiality. The metrics at play in each dimension are similar for both datasets, and PCA explains 77% of the variance in both datasets. These analyses differentiate scribbles by children from those drawn by adults. The three dimensions highlighted by this study provide a better understanding of the emergence of intentions and representativeness in drawings. We have already discussed the perspectives of such findings in Comparative Psychology and Evolutionary Anthropology.

Executive Function, Language, and the Toddler’s Discovery of Representational Drawing

Working memory capacity and executive functions play important roles in the early development of drawing and language, but we lack models that specify the relationships among these representational systems and cognitive functions in toddlers. To respond to this need, the present study investigated the relations between drawing and language in very young children, and the role of working memory capacity, inhibition, and shifting in the association between these two representational systems. The participants were 80 children, 25–37 months old. The results revealed that in toddlers (a) all the measures of working memory, inhibition, and shifting loaded on a single factor of general executive functioning; (b) language and drawing are two distinct, but substantially correlated, representational systems; and (c) the development of executive function has a strong impact on language development, which in turn influences the development of drawing.

Global Saccadic Eye Movements Characterise Artists’ Visual Attention While Drawing

Previous research has shown that artists employ flexible attentional strategies during offline perceptual tasks. The current study explored visual processing online, by tracking the eye movements of artists and non-artists (n=65) while they produced representational drawings of photographic stimuli. The findings revealed that it is possible to differentiate artists from non-artists on the basis of the relative amount of global-to-local saccadic eye movements they make when looking at the target stimulus while drawing, but not in a preparatory free viewing phase. Results indicated that these differences in eye movements are not specifically related to representational drawing ability, and may be a feature of artistic ability more broadly. This eye movement analysis technique may be used in future research to characterise the dynamics of attentional shifts in eye movements while artists are carrying out a range of artistic tasks.

Drawing as a Window Onto Expertise

The ability to draw is a uniquely human activity, ubiquitous in childhood but seldom performed at expert levels in adulthood. Relative to other domains of expertise (chess, music, sport), drawing is understudied, and yet because it is a universal developmental ability mastered by so few, it provides an ideal test bed for competing theories of expertise. In this review, three strands of active research and debate in the field of expertise will be considered in relation to representational drawing ability: (a) the characterization of expertise in relation to altered visual attention and memory, (b) the relative roles of personality traits and cognitive abilities, and (c) the interaction between genes and environment in the development of expertise. The study of representational drawing sheds new light on these three strands and provides rich avenues for further research in this domain.