Neurodevelopment of Drawing Ability in Children

I have had a long standing interest in the development of drawing skills in young children (from a neuropsychological perspective). Of course, children vary widely in talent, creativity, willingness to take risks, and so on, but there are some very interesting and predictable developmental stages which can be tracked through children's drawings, and which reflect what is going on at the level of brain development.

The Canadian Society for Education through Art maintains an archive of school children's art produced between 1930 to 1995, some examples of which are available in an on-line gallery. The documentation supplied is not the best (ages, dates, names of the young artists are often missing, the wrong captions are attached to some images, and the archive seems to have come to a crashing halt in 1995). Nonetheless, the archive is a potential treasure trove of data for researchers interested in cognitive development, in trends in art education, and the impact of arts education on subsequent academic achievement and vocational attainment. In a previous post, I wondered about what influence the "Kate Bush experience" had on the kids in a 1981 "Razzmatazz" studio audience, and similarly, I wonder about what has become of some of the students whose art is documented in the CSEA archive. Much of the work is wonderful, and reflects not only nascent talent on the part of the children, but the influence of dedicated and inspiring teachers.

Art produced by children between the ages of 6 and 12 provides a window into a very interesting period of neurological and cognitive development. Of course, drawing ability improves developmentally along with eye-hand co-ordination, fine motor skill, kinaesthetics etc., but what is most fascinating is the way in which children's drawing ability shows us something about the developmental progression from a "modular" brain to an "integrative" brain, as the frontal lobes develop and as interhemispheric and intrahemispheric connections are reinforced and refined.

I've pulled a few examples from the CSEA archive to illustrate.


Peter, age 6, 1976, British Columbia. (felt pen)
Peter's drawing is schematic and very verbal/analytic in nature. His drawing represents what he "knows", not what he "sees". Element by element, he documents what is important to him in the scene, as if following a list of key words or concepts. Drawing at this stage seems to be a very language-mediated activity. In the scene as he saw it, for instance, the electrical outlet would have been behind the presents and hence, not visible. But to Peter, it is a very important element, and so he includes it in his drawing.


Ken Kranrod, age 8, 1977, Alberta (pencil)
Ken's drawing is very accomplished. The detail is fantastic, and each element in his drawing is a little masterpiece. However, he is not fully out of the schematic stage. While the detail is rich and far more developed than that of the 6 year old above, Ken has not quite crossed the threshold of drawing what he sees: rather, he is representing what he knows and what is important to him when he thinks about a circus. (I love the swishy action-marks he's put in to give a sense of motion to the bear's dumbells!) Perspective, size of the elements, depth of field: none of this is developed in the overall composition. In fact, the elephant appears to be standing on the bear's head. The elephant and the hippo are also drawn in a very different, cartoon-like style, and demonstrate foreshortening in a manner that is not evident elsewhere. I wonder if these were copied from one of those "how to draw animals" books that are so beloved by children at this age, as their desire to produce representational and realistic drawings for a time trumps their joy in unfettered self-expression. By way of anecdotal finding, most kids seem to go through such a stage, although I am not aware of research specific to this observation.


Lynne Dunsmuir, age 10, 1970, British Columbia (oil pastel)
At age 10, Lynne is starting draw what she sees in a more realistic, representational manner without resorting to cartoon tricks and techniques. Her drawing is less about the disparate elements of what "makes a dog", and more about integrating categorical knowledge with real experience. At age 10, she is on the cusp of a period of tremendous frontal lobe development. She's really captured "dogness" in this drawing, because her brain now has far greater integrative capacity. Stated simply, she is more able to integrate what her left hemisphere "labels" with what her right hemisphere "sees".


A. Wallace, age 12, (Year?) New Brunswick ("paint")
A.Wallace has talent, no doubt about that. She (or he) is entering a much more mature stage of neurocognitive development. Those frontal lobes are really starting to work for her! She is in a watershed period for the development of abstract thinking, flexible problem solving, and increasing capacity for empathy, delay of gratification and moral judgment: these are all related to frontal lobe maturation (which will continue on through her late teens and even early twenties). These are all highly complex and integrative cognitive functions, and are more or less unique to humans, as is the making of art.

My apologies to colleagues and readers who may object to my oversimplification of the neuroscience involved. The point I want to make overall is that between the ages of 6 and 12, a great deal is happening in a child's cognitive and neurological development, and it is happening very rapidly. Opportunities to make art, and to be taught skills of "looking" as well as "making" should not be considered a mere recreational frill or therapeutic outlet for kids in school (although that's good, too!). Evidence is mounting that training in visual literacy and in making art may literally change brain development, by promoting and enhancing connections and feedback loops between various brain regions. (This has been studied fairly extensively in the case of music). The child's neurodevelopmental stage affects their art, and conversely, the practise of art may well affect brain development.

(related posts here, and here and here)

Cultural Universals in Music and Emotion

Earthenware pot: contemporary Mafa culture
Photograph by maremagna

Dave Munger at "Cognitive Daily" has a fascinating post today on the cultural universality of the perception of emotions as conveyed by music.

"The Mafa people, who live in the far north of Cameroon in the Mandara mountains, are one of the most culturally isolated groups in the world. Since many of their settlements lack electricity, there are some individuals who have never been exposed to western movies, art, or music.

Because of their isolation and very different musical tradition, they can help answer a question that has perplexed music scholars and psychologists for generations: are there musical "universals"? In other words, do the emotions conveyed by music depend on what we've learned through our culture, or can anyone perceive the emotion intended by a composer of a given musical work? Does "good" or pleasant music have cultural boundaries?"

Click through to read the entire article, if only to listen to the audio clips of Mafa music, which to me felt like a spring-time riot of buds and shoots bursting out of the ground. A little more web research revealed that the Mafa only use music as a celebratory medium, primarily around planting and harvesting. Curious about Mafa art, I was able to find the above example of an extraordinary hand built earthenware vessel, with human teeth.

Big Blue Brain

Chris Christoffels and José Roland's giant inflated polyester brain, installed atop the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, for the exhibition "InstruMENTAL"

"A giant human brain will hover above the museum’s roof-top terrace with its panoramic view of the city. Like a symbol of thought, the installation will be visible from near and far, and will reinforce the listed building’s physical presence. At night, it will resemble a large luminescent blue cloud."

Click here for an interactive web page mapping the various brain regions involved in the perception of rhythm, melody, pitch and timbre. Slightly oversimplified science, but the supremely goofy soundtrack makes up for it.

Angry Artist #1

I usually find myself getting peevish and cranky around the Ides of March. It is not that I feel sorry for Julius Caesar. It has to do with Daylight Saving Time and the weather in southern Ontario. Daylight Saving Time: a brutal and senseless exercise in mass sleep deprivation resulting in traffic accidents, medical errors, spousal arguments, etc., etc. The weather in southern Ontario: looks like spring, but it's a trick. Do not put your boots away and do not get your bike out of storage. Trust me. Another blizzard is just around the corner. Not even the prospect of green beer at my local pub can make me feel better today. No. That makes me feel much, much worse. Add it to my mid-March list of annoyances.

Best to channel that aggression by posting the following:

A man presented to the emergency room of a Vancouver hospital complaining of headache six hours after having been punched in the eye during a fight. A CT scan revealed the presence of a 10.5 cm long paintbrush, which had entered the brain through the left eye (bristles first, I might add).

The case was reported in a 2005 issue of Acta Neurochirurgica by four surgeons at the University of British Columbia (Drs. Mandat, Honey, Peters and Sharma).

"The authors report a case of penetrating head injury that presented with a deceptively mild complaint. To our knowledge, it is the first report of a paintbrush penetrating the brain. The patient reported being punched in the left eye and presented with a minor headache, swelling around the left orbit, a small cut on the cheek and slightly reduced left eye abduction. After radiological evaluation, a penetrating head injury was diagnosed. Under general anesthesia, through a lateral eyelid incision a 10.5 cm long paintbrush, which had penetrated from the left orbit to the right thalamus, was removed. No post-operative infection was seen at six months follow-up. This brief report serves to highlight that penetrating brain injury can occur without neurological deficit and that a minimally invasive surgical approach was successful in avoiding any complications."

Do not annoy, belittle, pester, or otherwise piss off an artist, at least not while he/she is wielding a paintbrush.

That was cathartic. I feel better already.

(This case has also been blogged within the scientific/medical community here and here.)

Tom Phillips: A Humument

Thr grand-daddy of altered books would have to be British artist Tom Phillips' A Humument . In the mid-1960s, Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W.H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began working over the extant text to create something new.

" I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. "

The revealed text on the page reproduced above reads as follows:

a door opened
on a glitter of fanciful
passages and rooms.
on the net (the net)
his mean
mosaic and
suite of
night
routine

Over the past four decades, Phillips has continued to revise and re-work A Humument. A version of it can be had as a paperback book, and as a small hardcover miniature.

Phillips also maintains a blog, in which he writes about his creative process. Here is a passage that is fascinating from a neuropsychological perspective:

"At art school we worked in silence. When eventually I graduated to independent studio life it occurred to me that listening to music would enhance the day: my LPs of Beethoven and Bartok string quartets could be just the thing. I was wrong. If I listened I stopped painting and if I painted I failed to listen, hearing just the first few familiar bars but only becoming aware of the piece again as the final cadence gave way to the hiss of needle on vinyl.

But priorities are priorities and I was always able to pay attention to the Test Match commentaries. Far from hindering concentration the spoken word seemed to take up the slack of a brain that would otherwise have inwardly burbled on about money and quotidien anxieties. When rain stopped play it was a double blow, although, as in winter, there was always BBC drama to look forward to after lunch. "

I cannot resist adding this tidbit: In the 60's Phillips taught at the Bath Academy of Art, where one of his students was Brian Eno.

Last One Out, Please Turn On The Lights

...a survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms.

Richard Nicholson's series of photographs and brief essay seems a very appropriate follow-up to the previous posts.

Darkrooms are disappearing. Polaroid film: going, going, gone. Yet, an increasing number of young photographers are interested in working with these analogue technologies. They are intrigued by the hands-on craft of darkroom work: the engagement of all five senses in the art making process. Something similar accounts for the recent resurgence of respect for painting at art schools in this country. Ditto, the massive interest in DIY and "upcycling" amongst young designers. The zeitgeist is evident at the cutting edge of other academic disciplines as well: ideas like "embodied cognition", and the flourishing of research into mirror neuron systems are two examples from cognitive science and neuroscience, respectively. These ideas have taken off in the context of a society-wide paradigm shift in the technologies we use, and in how we think about communication (Web 2.0, for instance). In a recursive fashion, the technology itself has given legitimacy to areas of exploration which previously were considered "infradig". It has become OK in art, and in science, to seriously explore affect, intuition, empathy, and to give the body it's due. Our embrace of digital technology has left more space around the edges for different sorts of creative thinkers, and that is a good thing.

I'll be returning to this theme over the course of future posts. But for now, let me leave you with this thought:

Obsolescence is a terribly over-rated concept.