Children's Reliance on Artist Intentions When Identifying Pictures

Source: Laboratories of Judith Danovitch and Nicholaus Noles—University of Louisville

Children are not the best artists. Sometimes it’s easy to pick out the characteristic triangular head, whiskers, and tail of a cat, but children often describe elaborate scenarios that they depict as a beautifully unrecognizable mess. Thus, given children’s questionable artistic talent, how do they know what their drawings, and the drawings of others, represent? One way children identify pictures is by relying on resemblance. If it looks like a cat, then it’s a cat. However, some pictures do not clearly resemble any real object. In this situation, children must use other means to figure out what the picture represents, including their understanding of what the person who created the picture intended it to represent.

By their first birthday, children are sensitive to the intentions of other people. They know that people’s actions are driven by their goals, and they can infer a person’s intentions even if the goal-directed action is not successful (e.g., they understand a person struggling to turn a lid intends to open a jar, even if they never see them succeed in opening it). By about age 3, children can use this understanding of intention to guide their interpretation of drawings and other pictorial representations. They apply this understanding both to identifying their own drawings, and to interpreting drawings created by another person.

This experiment demonstrates how to measure children’s use of intention to interpret otherwise ambiguous pictures based on the methods developed by Bloom and Markson.¹

Researchers tested 24 4-year-olds and found that 4-year-old children correctly identified 87% of the pictures in the drawing task (Figure 1). They also identified 83% of the pictures correctly in the size task and 68% of the pictures in the oddity task. All of these results were significantly better than chance at the p < 0.05 level. The researchers also tested 24 3-year-olds and found that they identified 76% of the pictures in the drawing task and 69% of the pictures in the size task correctly, which also reflects better than chance performance. However, the 3-year-olds only identified 54% of the pictures correctly in the oddity task, which is no different from chance performance. This suggests that children as young as age 3 can name a representation of an object based on the creator’s intention, even when it does not have a strong resemblance to the object’s actual shape, although their ability to do so is more fragile at age 3 than at age 4. 

Figure 1: Percentage of trials in which children from each age group identified drawings correctly in the drawing, size, and oddity tasks.

Pictures and drawings are symbols, and the ability to identify what a symbol represents is important for the development of a wide range of skills. As early as age 3, children realize that understanding the intentions of a drawing’s creator can allow them to identify a drawing that might otherwise be unidentifiable. Moreover, children as young as age 3 can do this even if the drawing bears no resemblance to the intended object. Although appearance and shape are certainly still valuable for identifying pictorial representations, this demonstration shows that children can use social-cognitive processes to infer what a drawing represents.

Understanding that an artifact’s identity is a function of its creator’s intent is also important for categorizing objects and knowing how to use them. For example, an object might look like a tall drinking glass, but if the person who created it intended it to be a vase, then people call it a vase and put flowers in it instead. This principle also applies to understanding language, including written words and other types of symbolic representations, such as maps. What matters in these cases is not the appearance or shape of the symbol, but shared knowledge about what a symbol is intended to represent.

Children’s early understanding that what a picture represents is determined by the artist’s intentions may also be the basis for appreciating abstract art. Adults can look at a painting that appears to be only blobs of paint and understand that it represents the night sky or a group of people. Not only can children do the same thing, but they can also appreciate that even when their own drawings do not turn out looking exactly like a cat or a birthday party, they still represent the objects they set out to draw.

1. Bloom, P., & Markson, L. Intention and analogy in children's naming of pictorial representations. Psychological Science. 9(3), 200-204 (1998).