Constraints on representational change: Drawing a man with two heads

Abstract

The sequences of actions by which children make drawings of familiar topics have been taken to exemplify their internal representations of procedural knowledge. In four experiments we tested Karmiloff‐Smith's (1992) claim that preschool children represent such knowledge as sequentially fixed lists by examining the extent to which they could vary their usual routine for drawing a picture of a man by adding a second head. Participants were mainly white, lower middle‐class boys and girls, aged 3 years to 9 years, living in the suburbs of a large city. We found more flexibility on this task than has previously been claimed and evidence that misconstrual of the task may account for some children appearing inflexible in previous studies. Nevertheless, a substantial number of young children did display a degree of inflexibility that was (1) relatively stable over time, (2) hard to account for in terms of misunderstanding of the task, and (3) not simply unwillingness to attempt novel drawings. Furthermore, this inflexibility was unrelated to drawing style within age groups, but declined with increasing age. While this apparent inflexibility could be interpreted as a consequence of internal cognitive constraints, it could also be explained as an attempt to maintain a symmetrical composition. We conclude, therefore, that the currently available data provide only qualified support for the operation of internal constraints on the flexibility of sequences of skilled actions.