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      Reconsidering the scribbling stage of drawing: a new perspective on toddlers' representational processes

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          Abstract

          Although the scribbling stage of drawing has been historically regarded as meaningless and transitional, a sort of prelude to the “actual” drawing phase of childhood, recent studies have begun to re-evaluate this important moment of a child's development and find meaning in what was once considered mere motor activity and nothing more. The present study analyzes scribbling in all its subphases and discovers a clear intention behind young children's gestures. From expressing the dynamic qualities of an object and the child's relationship with it, to gradually reducing itself to a simple contour of a content no more “alive” on the paper, but only in the child's own imagination, we trace the evolution of the line as a tool that toddlers use to communicate feelings and intentions to the world that surrounds them. We will provide a selected number of graphical examples that are representative of our theory. These drawings (13 in total) were extracted from a much wider sample derived from our studies on children's graphical-pictorial abilities, conducted on children aged 0–3 years in various Italian nurseries. Our results appear to indicate that scribbling evolves through a series of stages, and that early graphical activity in children is sparked and maintained by their relationship with their caregivers and the desire to communicate with them.

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          The role of tutoring in problem solving.

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            Making meaning: children’s perspectives expressed through drawings

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              Words and maps: developmental changes in mental models of spatial information acquired from descriptions and depictions.

              People acquire spatial information from many sources, including maps, verbal descriptions, and navigating in the environment. The different sources present spatial information in different ways. For example, maps can show many spatial relations simultaneously, but in a description, each spatial relation must be presented sequentially. The present research investigated how these source differences influence the mental models that children and adults form of the presented information. In Experiment 1, 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds and adults learned the layout of a six-room space either from verbal descriptions or from a map. They then constructed the configuration and pointed to target locations. Participants who learned from the map performed significantly better than those who learned from the description. Ten-year-olds performed nearly as well as adults did. The 8-year-olds' mental models differed substantially from the older children's and adults' mental models. The younger children retained the sequential information but did not integrate the relations into a survey-like cognitive map. Experiment 2 demonstrated that viewing the shape of the configuration, without seeing the map in full, could facilitate 8-year-olds' use of the verbal information and their ability to integrate the locations. The results demonstrate developmental differences in the mental representation of spatial information from descriptions. In addition, the results reveal that maps and other graphic representations can facilitate children's spatial thinking by helping them to transcend the sequential nature of language and direct experience.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                21 August 2015
                2015
                : 6
                : 1227
                Affiliations
                Department of Psychology, University of Turin Turin, Italy
                Author notes

                Edited by: Yvette Renee Harris, Miami University, USA

                Reviewed by: Simone V. Gill, Boston University, USA; Maulfry Worthington, VU University, Amsterdam, Netherlands

                *Correspondence: Claudio Longobardi, Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Via Po, 14, Turin 10123, Italy claudio.longobardi@ 123456unito.it

                This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01227
                4543818
                26347690
                aeab99ce-31ad-4f25-a77f-083e2d4e3986
                Copyright © 2015 Longobardi, Quaglia and Iotti.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 23 March 2015
                : 03 August 2015
                Page count
                Figures: 13, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 51, Pages: 9, Words: 6395
                Categories
                Psychology
                Hypothesis and Theory

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                scribbling,children's drawings,early childhood representation,infant behavior,child art

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