Parallel developmental changes in children's production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts

Childhood is marked by the rapid accumulation of knowledge and the prolific production of drawings. We conducted a systematic study of how children create and recognize line drawings of visual concepts. We recruited 2-10-year-olds to draw 48 categories via a kiosk, resulting in >37K drawings. We then analyzed changes in the category-diagnostic information in these drawings using vision algorithms and annotations of object parts. We found developmental gains in children’s inclusion of category-diagnostic information that was not reducible to variation in visuomotor control or effort. Moreover, unrecognizable drawings contained information about the animacy and size of the category children tried to draw. Using “guessing games” at the same kiosk, we found that children improved across childhood at recognizing each other's line drawings. This work leverages vision algorithms to characterize developmental changes in a large dataset of children’s drawings and suggests that changes in children’s drawings reflect refinements in internal representations.