Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans have been faced with the challenges of pictorialproduction since at least the Paleolithic. Curiously, while thecapacity to navigate layouts and recognize objects in everydaylife comes almost effortlessly, inherited from our evolutionarypast, the capacity to draw layouts and objects is more effortful,often needing time to improve over the course of anindividual’s development and with the technologicalinnovations acquired through culture. The present studyexamines whether young children might nevertheless rely onphylogenetically ancient spatial capacities for navigation andobject recognition when creating uniquely human pictorial art.We apply a novel digital coding technique to a publiclyavailable dataset of young children’s drawings of layouts andobjects to explore children’s use of classic pictorial depth cuesincluding size, position, and overlap. To convey pictorialdepth, children appear to adopt several cues, without apreference among them, younger than had been suggested byprevious studies that used other, less rich, analytic techniques.Moreover, children use more cues to pictorial depth indrawings of layouts versus objects. Children’s creation ofuniquely human pictorial symbols may thus reflect theirheightened use of depth for navigating layouts compared torecognizing objects, both cognitive capacities that humansshare with other animals.