Young Children's Viewer-centred Representations: Drawings of a Cube Placed Inside or Behind a Transparent or Opaque Beaker

Abstract

Previous research has found that young children characteristically draw what they know rather than what they see; they do not routinely draw viewercentred representations. The aim of the first experiment was to investigate the way subjects represent one object totally occluded by another. Although some of the younger children included what they could not see, most subjects aged 5 to 9 years and adults drew only what they could see. There was also a tendency among the younger children to differentiate in their drawings between the inside and the behind relationships in the scene. The second experiment investigated the subjects' interpretation of the main types of picture produced in experiment 1 by asking them to arrange the objects as they would have appeared to the artist. Most subjects matched their view of the objects to that shown in the picture, but the picture did not necessarily elicit the same object arrangement in experiment 2 as the artist in experiment 1 had seen.

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