Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children’s representations of object categories changeas they grow older? As they learn about the world aroundthem, they also express what they know in the drawings theymake. Here, we examine drawings as a window into how chil-dren represent familiar object categories, and how this changesacross childhood. We asked children (age 3-10 years) to drawfamiliar object categories on an iPad. First, we analyzed theirsemantic content, finding large and consistent gains in howwell children could produce drawings that are recognizable toadults. Second, we quantified their perceptual similarity toadult drawings using a pre-trained deep convolutional neuralnetwork, allowing us to visualize the representational layoutof object categories across age groups using a common featurebasis. We found that the organization of object categories inolder children’s drawings were more similar to that of adultsthan younger children’s drawings. This correspondence wasstrong in the final layers of the neural network, showing thatolder children’s drawings tend to capture the perceptual fea-tures critical for adult recognition. We hypothesize that thisimprovement reflects increasing convergence between chil-dren’s representations of object categories and that of adults;future work will examine how these age-related changes re-late to children’s developing perceptual and motor capacities.Broadly, these findings point to drawing as a rich source ofinsight into how children represent object concepts.