The Development of Cognitive Flexibility: Evidence from Children’s Drawings

Karmiloff-Smith [1990] has claimed that her ‘draw a strange man’ task indicates that young children’s first successful drawings are produced by inflexible procedural representations – consistent with her Representational Redescription (RR) model. In this paper, children’s drawings of a man with a beard, ‘a strange man’ and a normal man simply interrupted, indicated that young children are able to make modifications mid-procedure in a manner inconsistent with a procedural representation. Examination of the order of production of drawing elements indicated that the sequence is not as rigid as Karmiloff-Smith had predicted. A difference in types of spontaneous modifications with age in the ‘draw a strange man’ task was replicated. However, a further task explicitly requesting all the types of modifications observed in strange-man drawings (e.g., draw a man with something missing) demonstrated that young children have the ability to make all the types modifications, even if they do not do so spontaneously. Theoretical problems with the RR model in the drawing domain are discussed, and a new model, Recursive Re-Representation, is proposed which overcomes these theoretical problems and accounts more parsimoniously for the empirical data.