What Kids' Drawings Say About Their Future Thinking Skills
At age 4, many young children are just beginning to explore their artistic style.
The kid I used to babysit in high school preferred self-portraits, undoubtedly inspired by the later works of Joan Miro. My cousin, a prolific young artist, worked almost exclusively on still lifes of 18-wheelers.
These early works may be good for more than decorating your refrigerator and cubicle, researchers say. There appears to be an association, though a modest one, between how a child draws at 4 and her thinking skills at 14, according to a study published in the journalPsychological Science.
The findings don't mean parents should worry if their little ones aren't producing masterpieces early on. But the study suggests intellectual and artistic skills may be related to each other in a way that reveals something about the influence of our genes.
Researchers from King's College London enlisted 7,700 pairs of 4-year-old identical and fraternal twins in England to draw pictures of a child. The researchers scored each drawing on a scale of 0 to 12, based on how many body parts were included. All the kids also took verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests at 4 and 14.
Kids with higher drawing scores tended to do better on the intelligence tests, though the two were only moderately linked. And that was expected, says Rosalind Arden a cognitive geneticist who led the study while at the King's College Institute of Psychiatry. The drawing test researchers used was first developed in the 1920s to measure children's cognition. And studies have shown the test to be useful, but not always accurate.
In a surprise to the researchers, the drawings and the test results from identical twins (who share all their genes) were more similar to one another than those from fraternal twins (who share only half their genes). "We had thought any siblings who were raised in the same home would be What Kids' Drawings Say About Their Future Thinking Skills : Shots - Health News : NPR:
