Eliciting partial occlusions in the drawings of 4- and 5-year-olds

Abstract

When asked to depict a partially occluded scene, children as young as 4 or 5 years normally draw two complete and separate objects (intellectual realism). The man-wall hiding task is one exception, in which these children make more attempts at visual realism. Four- and 5-year-olds were given a standard task, followed by a hiding task and then the standard task again. Both age groups drew visually realistic pictures in the hiding task. The 5-year-olds but not the 4-year-olds were able to generalize their attempts at visual realism to their second attempt at the standard task. A second group of children who received the standard task, followed by another version of the standard task and then the standard task again, did not draw in a visually realistic way. In order to disentangle an explanation in terms of the notion of hiding from one based on the dissimilarity of the two objects in the hiding task, a third group of children received a dissimilar scene (but with no hiding component) between the two standard tasks. Most of these children did not draw in a visually realistic way, indicating that the notion of hiding conveyed in the hiding task is the main explanation for its success in eliciting visually realistic responses.