Sequential developments in children's human figure drawing

Abstract

This paper reports a series of three experiments which were conducted with 3‐ to 9‐year‐old children as well as with children with Down's syndrome of equivalent mental ages. These experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that the development of children's ability to draw the human figure is characterized by a cumulative developmental progression through the abilities to draw closed geometric forms, open geometric forms, segmented human figures and outline human figures, in that particular order. All three experiments produced convergent evidence for this same developmental sequence, which was exhibited both by the children without learning difficulties and by the children with Down's syndrome. The children's developmental position along this sequence was unaffected by the manipulation of verbal instructions and by the manipulation of the contents of the models being drawn. There was also a systematic relationship between children's developmental position and their free drawings of a human figure. It is argued that the findings of these experiments provide evidence for the existence of a sequential cumulative progression in the development of children's drawing.