Abstract
Figurative drawing is a skill that takes time to learn, and it 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 = 344) 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 color 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. Gender had no effect, but age influenced all three dimensions differently. These analyses for instance 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 discussed the perspectives of such findings in comparative psychology and evolutionary anthropology.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the Zenodo repository, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5387520.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the director and the teachers of the school for giving us access to their classrooms and showing interest in our research project. We are grateful to all the participants and to the parents of all the children, who accepted with enthusiasm to contribute to our study. Thanks also to Sarah Piquette, who provided help for the ethical components of this project.
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This project has received financial support from the CNRS through the MITI interdisciplinary programs and an IDEX Exploratory Research program from Strasbourg University.
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MP and CS supervised the study. MP and LM collected data. LM, BB and CS analysed data. CS wrote a first draft. All authors worked on the paper and approved the final version.
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Sueur, C., Martinet, L., Beltzung, B. et al. Making Drawings Speak Through Mathematical Metrics. Hum Nat 33, 400–424 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-022-09436-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-022-09436-w