Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children’s visual concepts change across childhood,and how might these changes be reflected in their drawings?Here we investigate developmental changes in children’s abil-ity to emphasize the relevant visual distinctions between objectcategories in their drawings. We collected over 13K drawingsfrom children aged 2-10 years via a free-standing drawing sta-tion in a children’s museum. We hypothesized that older chil-dren would produce more recognizable drawings, and that thisgain in recognizability would not be entirely explained by con-current development in visuomotor control. To measure recog-nizability, we applied a pretrained deep convolutional neuralnetwork model to extract a high-level feature representation ofall drawings, and then trained a multi-way linear classifier onthese features. To measure visuomotor control, we developedan automated procedure to measure their ability to accuratelytrace complex shapes. We found consistent gains in the recog-nizability of drawings across ages that were not fully explainedby children’s ability to accurately trace complex shapes. Fur-thermore, these gains were accompanied by an increase in howdistinct different object categories were in feature space. Over-all, these results demonstrate that children’s drawings includemore distinctive visual features as they grow older.