Developmental changes in drawing production under different memory demands in a U.S. and Chinese sample

Children’s drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across development. What are the major factors that explain this developmental change? Here we examined the degree to which these developmental changes in recognizability vary across different drawing tasks (i.e. drawing from observation vs. from memory), geographical locations (San Jose, US vs. Beijing, China), and with children’s tracing abilities. To do so, we collected digital drawings of object categories (e.g., cat, airplane) from 4–9-year-olds (N=253). We found that the developmental trajectory of drawing recognizability was remarkably similar when children were asked to draw from observation vs. memory and across these two geographical locations. In addition, we found that our Beijing sample produced more recognizable drawings but showed similar tracing abilities to children from San Jose, USA. Overall, this work suggests that the developmental trajectory of children’s drawings is remarkably consistent and not easily explainable by changes in visuomotor control or working memory.