Constrains on change in Representations during Development Using children’s drawing Mentor : Prof Amitabha Mukherjee Sonal Kumari

Representation here refers to the characteristic image that is solely internal to child’s mind and not that the child draws on paper Via internal representational changes one engages oneself to gain new knowledge by exploiting the already represented knowledge.

Objective is to understand the processes that children call forth for changing their already successful drawing procedures when they are explicitly asked to change them by setting new goals.

Subjects: 143 students between 4 to 12 years of age 4-7 : 30 students 8-12 : 113 students Method :  These children were asked to draw a tree  Then to draw a “tree that does not exist”  Same was repeated with House, Animal and Human

It was difficult to clear it to many of students the concept of “ a X that does not exist”. Many used multiple constraints together which called for changes in the scoring pattern a number of times. Variation in the drawing methods again called for changes in the pattern of analysis

4-7 year old 8-12 year old 1.Shape and Size of elements changed 2.Shape and size of whole changed 3.Deletion of elements 4.Insertion of new elements 5.Position or orientation changed 6.Cross category insertion

Tree House Animal Human Being 4-7 year old 8-12 year old

Younger children tend to bring about changes in the end of procedures, which involves minimum interruption in sequential order. Older children tended to delete at any point of the procedure showing greater flexibility to change in representational constraints.

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