traces of the artist: sensitivity to the role of the artist in children' s … ·...

415

British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2003) 21 415ndash4452003 The British Psychological Society

Traces of the artist Sensitivity to the role of theartist in childrenrsquos pictorial reasoning

Tara C Callaghan1 and Philippe Rochat2

1St Francis Xavier University Canada2Emory University USA

In three studies we investigated the question of whether children consider theattributes of the artist (sentience age level affective style emotion) when makingjudgments about the traces (drawings) made by that artist In Study 1 2ndash5-year-oldchildren were asked to find pictures drawn by a machine an adult an older and ayounger child Results indicated that children younger than 4 years do not consider theartistsrsquo attributes when making judgments but 4- and 5-year-olds do Furthermorewhereas the oldest children were adept at both machinendashperson (sentience) andpersonndashperson (age) contrasts 4-year-olds succeeded only with personndashpersoncontrasts In Study 2 videotaped artists displayed differences in degree of agitation(affective style) while drawing and this attribute was manipulated in the drawing byvarying line density asymmetry line overlap and line gap or all four features acrossstimuli Three- and five-year-old children judged whether a calm or agitated persondrew the stimuli Findings showed that five-year-old but not 3-year-old children easilycompleted the task In Study 3 3- 5- and 7-year-old children judged whether happy orsad artists made paintings of matching emotional tone Performance on this picturejudgment task was contrasted with performance on three theory of mind tasks (falsebelief emotion and interpretative) The results indicated that 5- and 7-year-oldssuccessfully judged the impact of artistsrsquo emotions on paintings but 3-year-olds did notPerformance on the picture task was related to that on the false belief task but not tothe emotion or interpretive tasks Taken together the results suggest that childrenrsquosview of visual symbols includes a consideration of the qualities of the artist beginningaround 5 years and there appears to be a common link between judgments of the mindbehind the visual symbol in the picture task and judgments of mental state reasoning inthe false belief task

wwwbpsorguk

Request for reprints should be addressed to Tara Callaghan Psychology Department St Francis Xavier UniversityAntigonish NS Canada B2G 2W5 (e-mail tcallaghstfxca)

Most philosophers agree that expression is one of the primary functions of art (Langer1953) and concur with the dominant view that there is no necessary relation betweenthe mental state of the artist and the expression of a mental state in a particular painting(Arnheim 1974 Goodman 1968) The property of expression is seen to reside in thestructural qualities of the symbol itself This is a sophisticated understanding of visualsymbols that is like Kohlbergrsquos Stage 5 of moral reasoning rarely found For mostchildren and young adults visual symbols such as paintings and photographs are notonly about objects and events in the world they are also about the persons whoproduce them (Freeman 1993ab 1995 Parsons 1987) Symbolic communication has adual function to specify about the world out there (ie the referents) as well as aboutthe mind behind the symbols (ie the mental state of the symbol maker) In order tounderstand the multiple layers of meanings in visual symbols the child needs to hold inmind the obvious meaning of the symbol and update that with meaningful informationfrom the visual symbol itself (eg colours line quality) as well as from inferences aboutthe mental state of the person who made the symbol (eg intentions emotionsdesires) At the core of this understanding is the knowledge that people create differentsymbols based on different communicative intentions In this research we focus on thedevelopment of this understanding and the links between it and other forms of socialcognition in early childhood

Freeman (1995) captures the complexity of visual symbol understanding in a modelsuggesting that mature pictorial reasoning involves an ability to map a complexintentional network that links pictures to three components the real or imagined worldthat they represent (ie the referent) the mind of the artist and the mind of thebeholder From this perspective the meaning derived from a pictorial symbol may shiftover development according to which aspect or aspects of the intentional network(referent artist beholder) are being considered by the child at that time Although weknow something about the development of childrenrsquos understanding of the linkbetween pictures and their referents we know little about the correspondingdevelopment in their reasoning about the roles of the artist or the beholder Theresearch reported here is exploratory in its investigation of the development of the firstof these relatively neglected aspects of the symbolic process We ask when childrenbegin to infer artistsrsquo states of mind from their graphic productions and how thisprocess of inference relates to the development of theories of mind a process that likepictorial reasoning involves an inference of how the mind will affect outcome Webegin with a review of what is known about the development of childrenrsquos pictorialreasoning about the links between pictures and referents beholders and artists

Pictures can be linked to their referents directly as in using a photograph to indicatewhich of two items to choose or indirectly as in using a photograph of studentprotesters to convey the idea of freedom and rebellion Sometime around their thirdbirthday children are able to use pictures having a direct correspondence to referentsto guide their responding in a variety of tasks (Callaghan 1999 2000a DeLoache 1991DeLoache amp Burns 1994 DeLoache Pierroutsakos amp Troseth 1997 HarrisKavanaugh amp Dowson 1997 Thomas Nye amp Robinson 1994) Sometime aroundtheir fifth birthday children are able to make judgments about the emotion portrayed inabstract paintings (Callaghan 1997) hence deriving meaning when there is an indirectcorrespondence between symbol and referent and can accomplish this at 3 years whenscaffolded by an adult who models these judgments (Callaghan 2000b) When probingthe limits of this understanding of the relation between picture and referent Thomasand his colleagues (Nye Thomas amp Robinson 1995 Robinson Nye amp Thomas 1994

416 Tara C Callaghan and Philippe Rochat

Thomas et al 1994) report that 4-year-olds have difficulty holding in mind both theobject and symbolic properties of pictures mistakenly reasoning for example thatpictures will update and backdate to match changes made to the referent Thus there isconsiderable refinement across development of childrenrsquos understanding of the relationbetween picture and referent

Pillow and Henrichon (1996) and Chandler and LaLonde (1993) explore childrenrsquosunderstanding of the link between the picture and beholder In their tasks children areasked to predict how a naDaggerve observer would interpret an ambiguous pictorial featureTypically the task presents a sequence of covered pictures with an ambiguous feature(eg a triangle) displayed through cut-out windows and children are asked to make aprediction as to what the entire picture represents on each trial On two trials the samepicture is revealed (eg shark with triangular fin) and on the third a different picture isdisplayed (eg house with triangular roof) Children initially predict that the samepicture will be revealed on the third trial and are then asked to predict what a puppetwould predict with the same sequence At around 7 years children realize that twopeople (themselves and the puppet) can hold different interpretations of the sameinput (ie an interpretive theory of mind) and predict that the puppet will mistakenlyguess that the third picture is the same as the first two These findings reveal both thatthere is refinement of childrenrsquos theory of mind beyond 4ndash5 years and that childrenrsquosreasoning about the role of the beholder in pictorial reasoning is a relatively latedeveloping skill

In one of the few studies to chart childrenrsquos pictorial reasoning about the role of theartist Freeman and Sanger (1993) interviewed 7ndash12-year-olds about the impact of anumber of factors including the artist on the quality of pictorial representations Theauthors report that it is not until late childhood (11ndash14 years) that children concedethat the qualities of the artist (ie skill intentions mood) could influence the quality ofthe trace agreeing for example that with a high level of skill artists could make uglypictures of beautiful things and vice versa These and other responses from theinterviews suggest that young children believe there to be a one-to-one correspondencebetween picture and referent artist or beholder whereas older children begin toconsider that the intentional relations between artist and beholder have an impact onthe trace In related research Parsons (1987) also interviewed children and youngadults about their views of the reasons that painters make paintings Selected responsesreported from these interviews also suggest that up until late adolescence childrenbelieve that artistsrsquo moods are directly transferred onto the canvas

Bloom and Markson (1998) report a much earlier sensitivity to artistsrsquo intentionsusing a naming task with 3ndash4-year-olds In a series of tasks children were asked to nameeither their own or another artistrsquos drawings The themes chosen for the childrsquos owndrawings ensured that amibiguous forms were produced (eg balloon lollipop) and thedrawings of others were scribbles that did not resemble their referents For examplechildren may be told that another child made a picture of a horse and a spider andpresented with a large and a small scribble Children typically named the large scribblelsquohorsersquo and the smaller one lsquospiderrsquo The findings suggested that in spite of the lack ofshape similarity between picture and referent children were successful in naming thepictures and appeared to rely on their own or another artistrsquos intentions when makingtheir judgments In a related study however Browne and Wooley (2001) report that ifthe intentions of the artist conflict with graphic resemblance (eg the artists announceshe will draw a bear and the picture resembles a rabbit) then participants (4- and 7-year-olds adults) rely on resemblance rather than intentions when naming the picture The

417Traces of the artist

tendency to rely on intentions when naming pictures was stronger when ambiguouspictures (eg drawings rated to look like a bear by half the participants and a rabbit bythe other half) were used but only for 7-year-olds and adults not for 4-year-olds Takentogether the findings from these two studies suggest that by 3 years of age children willuse intentions of the artist as a cue to name the picture when there are no otherconflicting cues but even adults fail to use intentions as a cue when the name cued byintentions directly conflicts with the name cued by resemblance

Although not explicitly instructed to attend to artistsrsquo intentions children inCallaghanrsquos (1997) study may have done so in their judgments of the emotional toneportrayed in paintings To highlight the target emotion in these studies children wereinitially presented with photographs of an actress displaying four emotions duringinstructions and then each target photo was on display as the child made their choicesThe findings indicated that children were able to make judgments of the emotionsportrayed sometime around their fifth birthday even though the relation betweenpicture and referent was indirect In a second study with preschoolers (Callaghan2000b) children were asked to find paintings that teddies who were made to lookhappy sad excited or calm would choose for their house When teddies first modelledappropriate choices children correctly judged the emotion portrayed in novel paintingsat 3 years Other researchers who do not highlight the emotions of the artists in theirinstructions do not typically report success on these tasks until 7ndash10 years (Jolley ampThomas 1994 Winner Blank Massey amp Gardner 1983) In hindsight usingphotographs of the artists as props in Callaghanrsquos studies may have led children toconsider the relations between a personrsquos (or teddyrsquos) emotional state and thepaintings This in addition to attending to the structural properties of the symbol itself(eg colour line compostion) may account for childrenrsquos relatively early success onthe task In the current studies we explicitly instruct children to judge paintings on thebasis of attributes of the artistsrsquo mental states

In summary studies investigating childrenrsquos sensitivity to how attributes of the artist(eg intentions emotions) have an impact on pictures vary in their estimates of theonset of this ability Variability may be due to different task demands In Freeman andSangerrsquos (1993) and Parsonsrsquo (1987) studies children revealed their understanding inverbal responses to interview questions It is possible that interviews may only revealchildrenrsquos explicit knowledge of the factors influencing picture quality knowledge thatKarmiloff-Smith (1992) has argued emerges relatively late in development Thusinterviews may underestimate childrenrsquos understanding Bloom and Marksonrsquos (1998)task was a forced choice task requiring children to associate names for large and smallreferents (eg horse spider) to large and small scribbles Callaghanrsquos (2000b) studyprovided models of correct choices Forced choice and modelling tasks mayoverestimate childrenrsquos understanding The developmental story needs to beinvestigated further especially as it relates to the onset and refinement of childrenrsquosunderstanding of the mind behind the symbol We address this need in the currentresearch

On the surface developing an understanding that pictures are intentional productsof artistsrsquo minds would seem to be related to developing an understanding thatbehaviours are intentional products of actorsrsquo minds (ie theories of mind) becauseboth involve an inference about how mind will affect outcome (behaviour or picture)Initially a simple theory of mind (or pictures) would predict a one-to-onecorrespondence between beliefs desires knowledge or emotions of an actor (orartist) and their behaviours (or pictures) as when 4ndash6-year-old children predict that a


puppet will look in the cupboard where they falsely believe the chocolate to be(Perner Leekham amp Wimmer 1987 Wimmer amp Perner 1983) or will feel happybefore they discover the coke has been replaced by milk (Harris 1983 1989) Later amore sophisticated theory of mind (or pictures) will allow that more complexintentional relations are at play as when 7ndash10-year-olds acknowledge that actors mayhide how they really feel (Gross amp Harris 1988 Harris 1989 Harris Johnson HuttonAndrews amp Cooke 1989) or that two people could have different interpretations ofthe same visual (Chandler amp LaLonde 1996 Pillow amp Henrichon 1996) or emotional(Harris 1983) input Whereas the developmental trajectory for theory of mind is welldocumented in the context of an understanding of the consequences of actorsrsquo beliefsdesires and emotions on their behaviours very little is known about the correspondingdevelopment in the context of an understanding of artists and their pictures Weaddress this lack in the current series of studies In particular we focused on thequestion of how childrenrsquos understanding that pictures are intentional manifestations ofartistsrsquo minds develops This research extends the efforts of Freeman (1993ab 1995Freeman amp Sanger 1993) Parsons (1987) and others (Bloom amp Markson 1998 Browneamp Wooley 2001) by employing behavioural (classification) rather than verbally basedinterview and naming tasks

The task used in the current studies to tap childrenrsquos understanding of the mentalstate behind the symbol involved presenting children between the ages of 3 and 7 yearswith series of pictures that were drawn by particular artists (eg young or old agitatedor calm happy or sad) Children were sometimes asked to judge which of two artistsmade the drawing and other times asked to match one artist to one of two drawingsBased on Callaghanrsquos findings (1997 2000b) for judgments of emotion portrayed inmuseum art we assumed that children come to this task with knowledge that distinctmental states (eg emotions) can be portrayed in pictures To complete the task used inthe current studies however children also required a sense that the person who madethe symbol may also have left a trace of hisher mental state in the symbol Whenpresented with a photograph and a brief description of the artist children were askedto make an inference as to how the artistsrsquo mental state would affect the marks on thedrawing or painting Given the propensity for children to construe a direct mappingbetween artistsrsquo mental states and the mental states expressed in paintings (Freeman1993ab Parsons 1987) this question would seem a natural one at least for our olderchildren (7 years old) To our knowledge outside the interview studies mentionedthere have been no other studies that directly ask children to reason about how themental state of the artist would affect the symbol (ie painting drawing photograph)that they produce and none that explore this reasoning in preschool-aged children

We explore the development of this reasoning in Studies 1 and 2 Study 1 framed thequestion in the context of two attributes of the artist age (ie drawings by people ofdifferent ages) and sentience (ie drawings by people vs machine) Children werepresented with drawings and told a young child an older child an adult or a machinemade them They were asked to find one drawing in a pair that was made by each ofthese kinds of artists Study 2 asked children to make judgments of drawings made byartists who were videotaped as they drew in either an agitated or calm manner Onceagain the task was for the child to match one drawing with its artist Finally Study 3assessed childrenrsquos judgments of artistsrsquo emotions and their effect on paintings as wellas investigated the connection between these judgments and the ability to infer themental states of others in well documented theory of mind tasks Performance on avisual symbol task in which we asked children to match happy and sad pictures with


artists depicted with matching feelings was compared to the performance of the samechildren on three theory of mind tasks a false belief task a false emotional expressiontask and an interpretative theory of mind task In general the rationale of Study 3 was toenlarge the topic of visual symbol understanding by identifying links between thisunderstanding and theories of mind in order to help us to capture more accurately thenature of childrenrsquos developing picture understanding particularly the construal ofwho is behind a visual symbol

Based on the existing literature of developing theories of mind and pictorialreasoning we predicted that between 4 and 5 years of age children would begin toshow signs of understanding that specific visual representations reflect the artistrsquos mindand not only the referent We anticipated that initially children would construe a one-to-one correspondence between attributes of the artist and quality of the trace and laterwould entertain more complex intentional relations Finally we hypothesized that acorrelation between such understanding and success on some if not all of the theoriesof mind tests would be found

STUDY 1In this study children were asked to make judgments of pictures drawn by four artists ayoung child (4 years) an older child (10 years) an adult and a machine (computerprinter) Age of the artists and sentience varied across conditions In this first study inthe series our aim was to explore whether children showed any consideration of theattributes of the artist when making these judgments Based on findings from Callaghan(1997 2000b) who asked children to make judgments of the emotion portrayed inmuseum art and the abundant evidence that children engage in causal mental statereasoning by 5 years of age (Perner 1991) we expected that children would begin tomake these judgments at 5 years

Method

ParticipantsFour age groups of 16 children were tested (N = 64) These groups were 2 years(M = 319 months range = 27ndash35 months) 3 years (M = 418 months range = 36ndash47months) 4 years (M = 526 months range = 48ndash56 months) and 5 years (M = 631months range = 60ndash68 months) of age Children from predominantly white and middleclass families were tested in a quiet room in their home or daycare centre Eachreceived a small present for their participation Parents who were present during theexperiment were asked not to interact with their children and all complied with thisrequest

StimuliThere were four stimulus sets constructed for this experiment by a machine (computerusing MacDraw) an adult an older child (11 years) and a younger child (4 years) Eachset consisted of the drawings by a particular artist of eight different objects a lollipop atree a cup and saucer balloons a bear a cube a bird and a house Sample drawings of


the bear from each of the four sets are presented in Fig 1 All drawings were simpleblack-and-white line drawings with identical line thickness They were initially drawnon plain white printer paper and then photocopied onto uniformly sized white coverstock paper (4 6 4 m) The size of the drawing was adjusted in the photocopyingprocess to ensure that all drawings were uniform in size covering approximately half ofthe card

ProcedureChildren were first instructed that they were going to play a game with some picturesand that their job in the game was to find the pictures that different artists had madeFollowing these general instructions children were presented with the lsquodrawingmachinersquo which was an old noisy Panasonic KX-P1180 multi-mode printer They weretold lsquoThis is a very special drawing machine It can make pictures Irsquoll show you how itdoes thisrsquo E then proceeded to show the child how the machine made its pictures byinserting a piece of paper lifting the top paper guard to obscure the view of what wasprinting and then turning on the printer to partially print a test page Thus the childwas told a story that this was a special lsquodrawing machinersquo and was presented withsufficient noise to lead them to expect that a drawing was being produced but werenot presented with the finished drawing

Once the drawing machine had been introduced it was put away and fourphotographs corresponding to each of the four artists (machine adult older childyounger child) were presented All human artists were male The artists wereintroduced as the drawing machine the grown up Dad the big brother and the littlebrother Children were told that each of these artists had made pictures that would beused in the game Following this all but one photograph was removed and the childwas instructed to find the pictures made by the highlighted artist using the followinginstructions lsquoWersquore going to start by finding all the pictures that (eg) the little brothermade Some of the pictures will be made by (eg) the grown up Dad but I want you tofind just the pictures made by the little brother OKrsquo Then the child was presentedwith eight pairs of pictures one pair for each of the eight objects One member of thepair was the target and drawn by the artist in the highlighted photograph and the othermember of the pair was the non-target and drawn by one of the other artists Bothpictures in the pair depicted the same object on a given trial and different objects wereportrayed across the eight trials of a block

Figure 1 Sample drawings used in Study 1


There were a total of six blocks of eight trials corresponding to the contrasts ofmachinendashadult (MA) machinendasholder child (MO) machinendashyounger child (MY) adultndasholder child (AO) adultndashyounger child (AY) and olderndashyounger child (OY) drawingsThe order of blocks was counterbalanced across participants within the followingguidelines Half of the children received the three blocks for the pairings of machinewith person (MA MO MY) first and the three blocks for the pairings of person withperson (AO AY OY) second The remaining half received the reverse order Fourorders for the presentation of the three blocks were randomly chosen from all possibleorders and assigned in counterbalanced fashion to four children in each of the agegroups Whether the children were asked to look for the machine or person inmachinendashperson pairings or the adult or older or younger child in the personndashpersonpairings was counterbalanced across participants In an effort to reduce positionperserveration the position of the correct picture was randomized across the eighttrials within a block with the restriction that the correct picture was not presented inthe same position for more than two consecutive trials The entire session comprising48 trials arranged in 6 blocks of 8 lasted approximately 15 minutes

Results and discussionChildren in four age groups (2 3 4 5 years) were presented with six types of contraststhree that differed in sentience of the artist (MA MO MY) and three that differed in agelevel (AO AY OY) The mean numbers of correct choices are presented in Table 1 Wefirst determined whether children were performing above chance levels To do this wesubjected the number of correct choices (of eight) to one-way ANOVAs at each agelevel with six contrasts (MA MO MY AO AY OY) as the experimental factor and usedthe least significant difference (LSD) test (Kirk 1968) to determine whetherperformance was significantly above chance (ie 4 of 8) Two-and three-year-oldchildren were not performing significantly above chance with any of the pairings andall contrasts were equivalent within each age (all Fs lt 1) for these ages Four-year-oldswere significantly above chance (p lt 05) only for the personndashperson pairs (AO AYOY) which were equivalent but not for any of the machine person pairings Five-year-

Table 1 Mean number of correct choices in Study 1 as a function of age and type of contrast

Type of contrast

Age MA MO MY AO AY OY M

2 years M 363 413 431 444 400 438 415SD 108 131 120 131 145 159

3 years M 443 363 444 375 413 438 413SD 150 115 155 153 213 196

4 years M 400 438 463 569 513 500 480SD 197 282 310 154 260 288

5 years M 488 563 581 563 569 550 549SD 200 290 308 213 296 310

M 419 444 480 488 473 481


olds were at chance for the MA contrast only presumably the most difficult among allthe contrasts and above chance (p lt 05) for all others

These findings were mirrored in the overall ANOVA that used a 4 Age 6 6 Contrastdesign There was a marginally significant trend for Age F(3 60) = 233 p lt 08 and asignificant Contrast effect F(5 300) = 224 p lt 05 Tukeyrsquos test of the marginal ageeffect indicated that 2- and 3-year-olds were equivalent and less good (p lt 05) than 4-and 5-year-olds who were comparable in their overall performance The Age effect waslikely not robust due to a number of children in the older age groups (three 4-year-oldsand four 5-year-olds) whose choice patterns were opposite to what we instructed (egreliably chose the young childrsquos picture when asked to chose the adultrsquos) This led tovery low numbers of correct choices for these children and significantly pulled thegroup averages down Only two 3-year-olds and no 2-year-olds showed this patternRather the tendency for these children was to perseverate on position leading to levelsof performance close to chance in most individuals Tukeyrsquos tests of the Contrast effectindicated that the MA and MO contrasts were equally difficult Only the MA contrastswere significantly different (p lt 01) from the remaining contrasts (MY AO AY OY)and these were equivalent

These findings suggest that children younger than 4 years do not reliably choosepictures on the basis of either sentience or age level of the artist By 4 years childrenbegin to do well when asked to make judgments of age level in personndashpersoncontrasts but not when asked to distinguish on the basis of sentience in machinendashperson contrasts Five-year-olds do well either with sentience or age level with oneexception the most difficult contrast of machine to adult (MA) Perhaps these childrenconstrue that adults and machines are of equal drawing skill level Support for this wasfound when some of the children expressed the opinion that you can tell a machine oradult did the drawing because it was more precise and accurate In contrast childrenwould sometimes point to a spot on the drawing where there was a gap in the line or anoverlap of lines when supporting a claim that they knew a child had done a drawingHowever as we did not systematically record rationale for choices from all children ormanipulate the perceptual features of the drawings we cannot be certain that allchildren reasoned in the same way In the next study we did systematically manipulatethe perceptual features that varied within drawing pairs and to extend the findings ofStudy 1 we asked children to judge drawings on the basis of a different attribute of theartist affective style (ie calm or agitated) The goal was to explore further childrenrsquosability to detect and differentiate idiosyncratic traces left by artists in their graphicproductions and to identify the stimulus features used to make judgments of this sort

STUDY 2In this study we extended the range of artistsrsquo attributes investigated to include affectivestyle (agitated vs calm) and manipulated the perceptual features (line densityasymmetry line overlap line gap) used to ensure the drawing portrayed an agitated vscalm style Children were presented with video clips of artists having a dynamicagitated or a serenecalm mood while working on a drawing but were not able to seethe actual production of these artists They were then asked to judge which artist madethe drawings that were subsequently presented This study allowed for exploration ofthe generalizability of the phenomenon reported in Study 1 to a new attribute of the


artist mood or affective style and for specification of the visual features children use tomake these judgments

Prior to choosing the stimuli for this study we conducted a pilot study with 42 adultsto ensure that the drawings categorized by the experimenters as those of the lsquocalmrsquo orlsquoagitatedrsquo artist were indeed judged to be so by naDaggerve adults The stimuli used in thepilot study were drawn by one of the experimenters who first drew nine objects whilesimulating a calm mood and then drew the same objects while simulating an agitatedmood The drawings were then compared by both experimenters and four perceptualfeatures (line density asymmetry line overlap and line gap) that clearly differentiatedbetween the two types of drawings in all nine cases were identified An inspection ofFig 2 attests to the primacy of these perceptual features in differentiating the baselinecalm and agitated drawings Following this the first experimenter then completed thesets of drawings by adding relatively agitated drawings that varied only one of theseperceptual features when compared with the calm baseline drawing Thus for each ofthe nine sets there was a calm baseline an agitated baseline (all four features variedcompared to the calm) and four relatively agitated exemplar drawings (only one featurevaried per drawing) for a total of six drawings per set



In the pilot study adults were presented with pictures from these nine sets one at atime and asked to indicate on a line directly below the drawing to what degree thedrawing appeared to be drawn by a relatively calmagitated person Agitated wasdefined for judges as lsquohighly agitated or excitablersquo and the painting movements of bothcalm and agitated styles were demonstrated The line was labelled as Calm at one endand Agitated at the other and the judges crossed over the line to indicate how calmagitated he or she believed the drawing to be The length of the line was measured foreach stimulus and these data were subjected to analyses of variance to determine whichfactors affected adultsrsquo judgments and where there was most agreement in the patternof judgments across adults in their choices The analyses confirmed that for six of thenine sets of drawings the calm baseline drawings were rated as most calm (mean linelength = 14 mm) and the agitated baseline drawings as most agitated (mean linelength = 53 mm) The drawings that varied only one perceptual feature ranged inbetween these two (mean line length = 22 mm for line density 32 mm for line gap 38mm for asymmetry and 46 mm for line overlap) For use in the study with children werandomly chose four sets from the six sets that showed a consistent pattern acrossadultsrsquo judgements To our knowledge there have been no studies that have askedchildren to make judgements on the basis of perceptual differences such as the onesmanipulated in these stimuli thus it is difficult to make precise developmentalpredictions regarding the effectiveness of these specific perceptual features inmediating judgments about the artistrsquos mood or drawing style However given thatchildren were able to judge the age and sentience of artists around the age of 5 years inStudy 1 we expected that they would also be successful in judging mood at the sameage

Method

ParticipantsA total of 32 children 16 at each of the ages of 3 years (M = 433 months range = 36ndash47 months) and 5 years (M = 614 months range = 60ndash65 months) participated in thisexperiment Children were predominantly from white middle class families They weretested in a quiet room in their home or daycare centre and received a small present fortheir participation When parents were present during the experiment they were askednot to interact with their children and all complied with this request

StimuliTo highlight the artistsrsquo drawing style children were presented with short video clips ofadults drawing with either a very calm serene style or a highly charged agitated styleThe actresses drew on an easel in a position where their body movements were highlyvisible but where the drawing was not They were filmed individually

All drawing stimuli were simple black-and-white line drawings photocopied ontowhite cover stock (4 6 4 in) Drawings were of equivalent line thickness and sizecovering approximately half of the card As stated the four features that wereindividually manipulated in the relatively agitated drawings (ie compared with baselinecalm drawings) included line density asymmetry line overlap and line gap We alsomanipulated all four features to produce a baseline-agitated type Thus this resulted in


six types of drawings baseline calm baseline agitated and the four relatively agitateddrawings (line density asymmetry line overlap and line gap) There are nine non-overlapping types of contrasts that can be made by pairing these stimuli so that eitherall four or only one feature differs across the pair Four features differed across the paironly when the baseline calm drawing was paired with baseline agitated (CAG) drawingSingle features differed in all other contrasts For half of these contrasts the baselinecalm drawing was paired with a relatively agitated drawing that differed in either linedensity (CLD) asymmetry (CAS) line overlap (CLO) or line gap (CLG) across the pairFor these contrasts the correct choice was the calm drawing when children werelooking for calm and the agitated drawing when children were looking for agitated Forthe remaining half a baseline agitated was paired with a relatively agitated drawing thatdiffered in line density (AGLD) asymmetry (AGAS) line overlap (AGLO) or line gap(AGLG) For these contrasts the correct choice was the less agitated of the pair whenlooking for calm and the more agitated when looking for agitated These nine sets thuscomprise five where a calm drawing is paired with an agitated one (subsequentlyreferred to as CalmAgit) and four where two agitated drawings are contrasted(AgitAgit) Sample drawings of these types are presented in Fig 2

ProcedureChildren were tested individually on two successive days to avoid fatigue They werefirst oriented to the task by E who said they were going to play a game with somepictures and that their job in this game was to find the pictures that were made by twodifferent people Then children were shown the video clip of one of the artistsfollowed by the other as E remarked lsquolsquoLook at (Susie or Annie) see how she isdrawing She is really (lsquocalmrsquo or lsquoexcited and crazyrsquo) when she draws isnrsquot she I wonderwhat her drawings look likersquorsquo E then paused while the child watched the video forapproximately 30 seconds and said lsquoLetrsquos look at our other artist and see how shedrawsrsquo Then E presented the second video clip using the same commentary Followingthis short introduction to both artistsrsquo mood and affective style E represented the videoclip of the artist whose drawings the child was to find for that day (see below) Allchildren looked for both Calm and Agitated drawings in counterbalanced order acrosstwo days of testing

Within each day of testing children were presented with both CalmAgit and AgitAgitpairings In the CalmAgit group there were drawings of four objects for each of fivecontrasts yielding a deck of twenty pairs of cards that were presented in random orderFor the AgitAgit group there were also four drawings but this time of four contrastsyielding a deck of sixteen pairs of cards that were randomly ordered On any given daythe child was looking for only one type of drawing either calm or agitated dependingon the artist that had been highlighted in the instructions Note that when the child waslooking for a drawing in the CalmAgit group there was always a drawing in the pair thatwas not calm or not agitated When looking for a drawing in the AgitAgit group theywere forced to make a relative judgment because there was no baseline calm drawingboth were agitated Position of the correct choice was randomized with the restrictionthat it not appear on the same side for more than two consecutive trials Each of thetwo daily sessions lasted approximately 15 minutes


Results and discussionChildren at two age levels (3 5 years) were asked to find drawings made by artistshaving two affective styles (Calm Agitated) when presented with pictures that pairedcalm with agitated drawings (CalmAgit) or agitated with agitated drawings (AgitAgit)and that varied four features (line density asymmetry line overlap line gap) eithersingly or all together to stand for more or less agitation Type of object drawn effectsand order effects were first examined by subjecting proportion of correct choices toone-way ANOVAs Neither ANOVA revealed any significant effects on performance (allFs lt 1) We then determined whether children were performing above chance andexamined the relative effects of experimental variables as outlined below

Emotion and pairing effectsThe mean proportion of correct choices averaged over the type of feature contrast andtype of drawn object was calculated for each child for the CalmAgit and AgitAgitpairings both when they were looking for the drawings produced by the calm and bythe agitated artists These data were subjected to a 2 (Age) 6 2 (Emotion) 6 2 (Pairing)repeated measures ANOVA A LSD test was used to determine whether performancewas significantly different from chance Three-year-olds were not performing abovechance (50) in any of the four conditions whereas five-year-olds were well abovechance in all conditions This age effect was confirmed by the pattern of effects foundin the ANOVA Significant Age F(1 30) = 16368 p lt 001 Emotion F(1 30) = 635p lt 02 and Pairing F(1 30) = 1050 p lt 003 main effects were found These must beinterpreted in light of the interactions of Age 6 Pairing F(1 30) = 1238 p lt 001 andEmotion 6 Pairing F(1 30) = 700 p lt 01 Simple effects tests of the Age 6 Pairinginteraction showed that CalmAgit pairings were easier p lt 01) than AgitAgit pairingsbut only for the 5-year-olds (93 vs 79 respectively) There was no pairing effect for 3-year-olds (49 vs 50) Simple effects tests of the Emotion 6 Pairing interactionindicated that one condition resulted in poor performance relative to the rest Whenchildren were looking for drawings of the agitated artist in AgitAgit pairings theyperformed poorly (58) relative to when they were looking for those in CalmAgitpairings (70) plt01 or looking for Calm drawings in either pairing (73 and 71 forCalmAgit and AgitAgit respectively)

Table 2 Mean proportion of correct choices in Study 2 as a function of age pairing and emotion

Emotion

Calm Agitated

Age CalmAgit AgitAgit CalmAgit AgitAgit M

3 years M 53 57 46 43 50SD 16 17 19 13

5 years M 94 84 93 74 86SD 07 08 13 18M 73 71 70 58


These results suggest that children who are younger than 5 years apparently do notinterpret drawings in terms of the inferred impact of affective style of the artist on thesubsequent drawing whereas 5-year-olds accomplish this task with ease The resultsalso indicate that the judgments made by the older children are affected by two factorsthe emotion they are looking for (calm agitated) and whether the judgment is anabsolute (CalmAgit) or relative (AgitAgit) one Whereas looking for agitated is moredifficult overall than looking for calm and relative judgments are more difficult overallthan absolute performance does not seriously deteriorate until both of these factors areoperating as in looking for agitated drawings in AgitAgit pairs

Feature effectsIn order to determine which features children associate with drawings produced by anagitated artist we calculated the number of correct choices (of a total of four) for eachfeature contrast (CAG CLD CAS CLO CLG AGLD AGAS AGLO AGLG) and separatelyanalyzed the data for CalmAgit and AgitAgit pairings The means relevant to theseanalyses are presented in Table 3

For CalmAgit pairings a 2 Ages 6 2 Emotion 6 5 Feature Contrast repeatedmeasures ANOVA was performed The ANOVA revealed significant Age F(130) = 25467 p lt 001 and Feature Contrast F(4 120) = 269 p lt 03 main effectsThe age effect indicated that 3-year-olds (198) performed significantly more poorlythan 5-year-olds (374) LSD tests confirmed that 3-year-olds were at chance for allcontrasts and both emotions whereas 5-year-olds were above chance in all conditions(p lt 05) A posteriori analyses of the Feature Contrast effect showed that for contrastsin which the Calm baseline was contrasted with line density or overlap or with anAgitated baseline performance was equivalent and at the highest level When the Calm

Table 3 Mean number of correct choices (of a total of 4) in Study 2 as a function of age emotion andtype of feature contrast for CalmAgit and AgitAgit pairings

Feature contrast

Age Emotion All Density Asymm Overlap Gap M

CalmAgit3 years Calm M 24 23 16 19 24 21

SD 12 14 05 11 13Agitated M 16 19 19 23 16 18

SD 14 13 09 11 145 years Calm M 40 39 36 39 34 38

SD 00 03 06 03 06Agitated M 39 29 36 38 35 37

SD 03 04 06 04 06

AgitAgit3 years M 20 23 19 18 20

SD 09 13 11 095 years M 30 31 29 35 31

SD 12 08 09 08


baseline was contrasted with line gap performance was poorest Performance was atan intermediate level when the Calm baseline was contrasted with asymmetry in thisoverall ANOVA however when 5-year-oldsrsquo data were analysed separately theasymmetry contrast were at the same level as line gap contrasts

Thus it was easy for children to discriminate between the two drawings of a pairwhen all four features differed as well as when line density or line overlap alonediffered In contrast line gap and asymmetry alone were not enough to help childrenfind the calm or agitated pictures in these pairings These results suggests that line gapand asymmetry are not features that children associate with drawings of an agitatedperson but line overlap and line density are Note that these findings held regardless ofwhether the child was looking for Calm or Agitated drawings

For AgitAgit pairings (see Table 3) a 2 Ages 6 2 Emotion 6 4 Feature Contrastrepeated measures ANOVA was performed The ANOVA revealed significant Age F(130) = 4847 p lt 001 and Emotion F (1 30) = 1201 p lt 002 main effects and aninteraction of Age 6 Feature Contrast F(3 90) = 278 p lt 05 The age effect showedthat 3-year-olds (201) were performing less well than 5-year-olds (314) LSD testsindicated that the performance was at chance for all types of contrasts for 3-year-oldsand above chance for all contrasts for 5-year-olds (p lt 01) The emotion effect indicatedthat looking for calm (283) was easier overall than looking for agitated (232) Simpleeffects tests of the interaction showed that the feature contrast effect held only for 5-year-olds Tukeyrsquos LSD tests indicated that when drawings were contrasted by the linegap feature performance was best (p lt 05) and all other feature contrasts resulted inequivalent performance

These findings suggest that when presented with the task of choosing the calm oragitated drawing in pairs in which there is one highly agitated and a second relativelyagitated drawing (AgitAgit) 5-year-olds find line gap the best feature to tune into butcan also do the task by tuning into any of the others This reinforces the results foundfor CalmAgit pairs which indicated that children do not tune into line gap whenmaking the discrimination between the calm baseline and relatively agitated drawingsIn the AgitAgit pairs asymmetry seemed to cluster with the features line overlap andline density but not with line gap In the CalmAgit pairings discussed above the anchorcalm baseline did not have an asymmetric form or line gaps and so in that contextasymmetry and line gap were apparently accepted as calm features Thus regardless ofcontext (CalmAgit or AgitAgit) line gap appears to be accepted as a feature of drawingsmade by a calm person and line density and overlap are considered to be features of anagitated personrsquos drawing The feature of asymmetry flip flops if it is seen in thecontext of a calm baseline it is accepted as a calm feature but if seen in the context ofan agitated baseline it is assigned as a feature of an agitated drawing

Overall the results of this second study are consistent with the findings of Study 1By 5 years children begin to be capable of mapping graphic productions to the mind ofthe artist Five-year-olds are capable of attributing drawings to artists based onparticular or clusters of features of the drawing but not others Furthermore theresearch demonstrates that particular features appear to stand for particular affectivestyles and moods of the artists (eg line gap signals calm whereas line density andoverlap signal agitated) Five-year-olds like adults pick up on those pictorial features tomake sense of the person behind the artistic production


STUDY 3In the final study we extended our investigation of childrenrsquos judgments of how mentalstates of the artist affect the symbol in two ways (i) We asked whether children canmake judgments of how the emotions of artists may be revealed in paintings Whereasearlier studies have explored childrenrsquos appreciation for the emotion expressed inpaintings (Callaghan 1997 2000b) in Study 3 we explicitly asked children to match theemotion expressed in paintings with the emotion felt by the artist (ii) We comparedchildrenrsquos performance on a picture judgment task with that in three classic theory ofmind tasks that required different levels of sophistication in mental state reasoning Wedid this in an effort to assess whether the mental state reasoning required in judging themind behind the picture is similar to any particular level that is invoked when judgingthe mind behind the behaviour

As noted earlier although the expression and appreciation of emotion in art is seenas central to full aesthetic experience (Gardner 1973 Langer 1953 Winner 1982)most estimates of the age of onset of this appreciation claim that it is not until relativelylate in childhood that emotions expressed in art are judged accurately (Carothers ampGardner 1979 Parsons 1987 Winner Rosenblatt Windmeuller Davidson amp Gardner1986) Recent work challenges this claim and finds that when a matching task is used 5-year-old childrenrsquos judgments of emotion resemble those of adults (Callaghan 1997)and when an adult models appropriate choices even 3-year-olds judge the emotionexpressed in paintings (Callaghan 2000b) What has not yet been investigated in depthis whether children make judgments about how the emotions of an artist may or maynot be expressed in a painting although from their interviews with children Parsons(1987) and Freeman (1993b) claim this is also a relatively late developing ability

Goodmanrsquos (1968) claim that emotions are expressed metaphorically in paintingsand as such belong to the symbol and not the artist reveals a sophisticated level ofaesthetic understanding that has undoubtedly developed from a more simplisticappreciation In their interview studies both Freeman (1993b) and Parsons (1987) notethat young children typically believe there to be a one-to-one correspondence betweenpicture and referent artist or beholder Thus a painting of an angry scene would beangry a sad artist would make a sad painting and a happy viewer would see allpaintings as happy What we probe in Study 3 is the development of childrenrsquosconstrual of the link between the artistrsquos emotion and the emotion portrayed in theartistrsquos work using a judgment task in addition to interview questions

In the picture judgment task children were presented with photos of two artists oneexpressing a happy and the other a sad emotional state They were then asked to judgewhich artist painted what painting in a set of 12 The happy and sad emotions werechosen because they contrast the valence (pleasuredispleasure) dimension of theemotion which has been found to be discriminated at an earlier age than degree ofarousal dimension (Callaghan 1997 Russell amp Bullock 1985) A pilot study of 15 artistswas conducted in order to determine which paintings in a set of 64 representative of 4emotions (happy sad calm and excited) had the highest level of agreement The entireset of postcards of museum art were presented to artists who were asked to judgewhich category the painting fell into as well as to rank on a 10-point scale how well thepainting expressed the emotion they had chosen All 64 stimuli were ranked at 8 orabove on the rating scale by all artists revealing that they could confidently categorizethe stimuli into the categories provided The percent of agreement among artists oncategories was then calculated and 6 stimuli with highest agreement for each of the


happy and sad emotions were chosen for use in Study 3 The stimuli chosen for thehappy set averaged 77 agreement (range = 67ndash93) and those for the sad setaveraged 83 (range = 73ndash93)

We expected to find that children were able to make judgments of the artist behindthe picture at the same time that they make judgments of the emotion portrayed in thepicture around the age of 5 years (Callaghan 1997) In addition to the picturejudgment task children were tested in three classic theory of mind tasks chosenbecause they require increasingly sophisticated mental state reasoning as outlined inthe general introduction crayon false belief (Perner et al 1987) emotion false belief(Gross amp Harris 1988) and interpretive theory of mind (Pillow amp Henrichon 1996)Four to five-year-olds typically pass the crayon task (Perner et al 1987) and 6-year-oldsusually pass the emotion and interpretive tasks (Gross amp Harris 1988 Pillow ampHenrichon 1996) To gather developmental data that would allow us to calculatecorrelation between success on the picture and theory of mind tasks groups of 3- 5-and 7-year-olds were tested on all tasks

Based on the existing literature and the results obtained in the preceding twostudies it was expected that 3-year-old children would fail all theory of mind tasks aswell as the picture task We further predicted that the trend toward success in thepicture task by 5-year-olds should correlate with their success on the crayon false belieftask but not the emotion false belief task the latter expected to be passed successfullyby the majority of 7-year-olds only The rationale for the latter prediction is that theemotion false belief task in comparison with the crayon false belief task requires anadditional decoupling between the perceived and its referent (see task description inthe method below) In general we expected that reasoning about the artist behind agraphic production should correlate with the levels of mental reasoning indexed by thevarious theory of mind tasks If children have a more sophisticated form of mentalreasoning in the theory of mind tasks they should also have more sophisticatedreasoning about paintings Because it would be difficult to assess the limits of childrenrsquosunderstanding of the complexity of the relationship between artist and product in thesimple two-choice picture task we also included a brief interview based on Freemanand Sanger (1993) which probed more deeply childrenrsquos understanding We expectedthat children who showed an understanding of the subjective mind as indexed by theemotion false belief and interpretive theory of mind tasks (Gross amp Harris 1988 Pillowamp Henrichon 1996) would also hold the view that the relation between mental state ofthe artist and mental state portrayed in the painting does not have to be a matchingone-to-one relation

ParticipantsA total of 36 children 12 in each of three age groups 3 years (M = 369 monthsrange = 34ndash43 month) 5 years (M = 631 months range = 58ndash67 months) and 7 years(M = 858 months range = 80ndash92 months) participated in this experiment Childrenwere predominantly from white middle class families recruited from daycare centresand through telephone calls to parents who had previously indicated their willingnessto participate in research Children were tested individually in a quiet room in theirdaycare centre or in the laboratory Two additional 3-year-olds were excluded from dataanalysis because they were absent on the second day of testing


Materials and procedure

GeneralChildren participated in a total of five tasks (picture crayon emotion interpretiveinterview) The picture task was always conducted first the order of the theory of mindtasks was randomized across children and the interview was always completed lastChildren were tested over two days in sessions that lasted approximately 20 minuteseach

Picture judgment task

StimuliThe art stimuli are listed in Appendix A Twelve pieces of museum art six from each ofthe emotions happy and sad were presented to children The art encompassed a rangeof artistic styles periods and artists and did not contain any human figures that coulddirectly cue emotion through facial or postural expression Postcards of the artworkwere machine copied in colour enlarged to a common size (8 6 10 in) enclosed in aplastic cover placed in a binder and presented individually by turning the pages Thecolour photographs of the artists unambiguously expressing the emotions happy andsad were mounted in plastic standing frames No features of the photographs coulddirectly cue whether the painting matched the affect expressed by a particular artist

ProcedureChildren were told they were going to play a game in which they would find paintingsmade by different artists They were presented with the photographs of the artists andtold that these artists had made a number of paintings and that the artists were feelingdifferent emotions when they made the paintings The experimenter first labelled theemotion felt by the artist as she showed the photograph to the child and then asked thechild to label how the artist felt before presenting the paintings saying lsquoSo how doesthis artist feel And this onersquo All children correctly labelled the emotion expressed bythe artist The experimenter then instructed the child in the following way lsquoWersquoregoing to play a game where you find the paintings made by these artists Some of thepaintings were made by the Sad artist when she was feeling sad and some were madeby the Happy artist when she was feeling happy What you have to do is decide eachtime I show you a painting who did it Did the Happy painter do it or the Sad painterThe paintings are all mixed up so look carefully each time so you can decide who madethe paintingrsquo Paintings were presented individually immediately following instructionsand photographs of the artists were kept in view one on either side of the binder

ScoringResponses were given 1 point if they matched the emotion (ie happy or sad) portrayedin the art piece as determined by the pilot study with adult artists and 0 if they did notmatch The total number of matches of 12 was then calculated for each child and usedin subsequent data analyses


Interview task

ProcedureOnly 5- and 7-year-olds were probed more deeply about their views on the relationbetween the emotion felt by an artist and the emotion portrayed by that artist in apainting Three-year-olds were not interviewed because they were not expected toperform above chance in the picture judgment task The interview questions were thusexpected to identify whether children who had successfully matched paintings withthe photograph of an artist expressing an emotion were firm in their belief that therewas a one-to-one correspondence between artistsrsquo mood and emotion portrayed in thepainting (ie happy artist paints happy pictures sad artist paints sad pictures) oralternatively believed the artistsrsquo mood may not necessarily directly predict the moodportrayed (ie a happy artist could also paint a sad painting and vice versa) In additionto a number of filler questions we asked three target questions in the interview

(1) Whether a painter would make a painting that matched the painterrsquos mood (ArtistrsquosMood)

(2) Whether it was possible for a painter to make a painting opposite to the mood theywere feeling when they made the painting (Opposite Mood)

(3) After identifying events that had made the child themselves happy and sadchildren were asked whether a painter could make a painting that was opposite inmood to the personal events identified by the child (Relevant Subject)

This last question was chosen to make it more likely that children could relate to thequestions because it had personal relevance however it may make it less likely thatchildren would feel it was possible for an artist to make a drawing opposite to the moodevoked by that personal event The interview task was always conducted at the end ofthe session

ScoringThe proportion of children answering yes to the three questions identified above wascalculated for each age group and compared with the proportions expected using thebinomial (p=50) The first question (Artistrsquos Mood) was expected to be answered in theaffirmative at both ages and the second and third questions were expected to be morelikely to be answered in the affirmative in older as compared to younger children

Crayon false belief task

StimuliA box for 16 Crayola crayons was filled with Band-Aids and used as the prop for thistask In addition a 10-in high child doll named lsquoPatrsquo which was gender neutral inname dress and appearance was used to help children consider the other personrsquosview

ProcedureIn this task based on Study 2 from Perner et al (1987) children were first introducedto the doll and told they were going to play a game with the doll The experimenterused the following script to introduce and play the game lsquoFirst we have to hide Pat inthis box so he (or she if the child was female) canrsquot see or hear anything wersquore doing


He canrsquot see anything can he (All children agreed) Now look at this (the experimenterpulls out the crayon box) what do you think is in here Whatrsquos in this box (Theexperimenter waited for the childrsquos response and then repeated the childrsquos answerwhich in all cases was crayons) Crayons Letrsquos look and see You open the box and seewhatrsquos inside (The experimenter peered toward the box waiting for the childrsquosresponse) Whatrsquos in the box Band-Aids What a silly thing Band-Aids in the crayonbox Now wersquore going to get Pat out and see what Pat thinks (The experimenter askedthe child to close the crayon box and then pulled the doll from its hiding place in thebox) What does Pat think is in the box (The experimenter waited for the childrsquosresponse) Now show Pat what is in therersquo

ScoringChildren were given 1 point if they answered lsquocrayonsrsquo to both questions and 0otherwise

Emotion false belief task

StimuliThe stimuli used in this task are presented in Appendix B All were stories from earlierresearch (Gross amp Harris 1988 Harris Donnelly Guz amp Pitt-Watson 1986) or newstories based on the rationale of those researchers In half of the stories a positiveemotion and in the remaining half a negative emotion was highlighted Stories alsovaried according to whether the story protagonist would show or hide emotions InDiscrepant stories a reason was given for the story protagonist to hide their emotionsfrom other story characters and in NonDiscrepant stories a reason was given for theprotagonist to show how they really felt This distinction allowed us to determinewhether children were aware that there is not always a one-to-one correspondencebetween felt emotion and emotion portrayed through facial expression Each childlistened to eight stories (four Discrepant two each positive and negative and fourNonDiscrepant 2 each positive and negative) Each story had a main character namedDavid (for boys) or Diana (for girls) Children were introduced to the task with thefollowing instructions lsquoWersquore going to listen to some stories about a girl named DianaIrsquom going to ask you about how Diana really feels inside in these stories and how shelooks on her face She might really feel sad (happy) inside but look happy (sad) on herface Or she might really feel sad (happy) inside and look sad (happy) on her face Soshe might look a different way on her face or the same way Each time Irsquoll tell you anew story about Diana and you have to listen carefully to see how shersquos feeling and howshe will look on her face in that storyrsquo Following these instructions the child was readthe first story and then asked a series of questions from the categories of memoryreality appearance and otherrsquos view (Gross amp Harris 1988) Examples of thesequestions for the first story are given in Appendix B

Memory questions were asked first and if children were unable to answer thesequestions correctly the story was reread and the questions reposed If the child couldnot answer the memory questions correctly on three consecutive tries theexperimenter moved to the next story The order of reality and appearance questionswere counterbalanced across children and the otherrsquos view question was always askedlast as it required inserting the childrsquos response to reality and appearance questionsinto the question The first memory question focused on the situation causing the


protagonistrsquos real emotion and the second concerned the reason for displaying eitherthe same or a different emotion The reality question asked how the protagonist wouldreally feel The appearance question asked how the protagonist would look on her faceThe otherrsquos view question asked what the other story characters would think abouthow the protagonist was feeling The order of stories was randomized for each child

ScoringIn all stories points were given only when the childrsquos choice of the emotion in thereality question was appropriate (ie matched the one highlighted in the story) ForDiscrepant stories 1 point was given for each time different emotions were chosen forreality and appearance questions and the response for the otherrsquos view questionmatched the appearance question For NonDiscrepant stories 1 point was givenwhenever appropriate and identical emotions were chosen for the reality appearanceand otherrsquos view questions Each childrsquos total score (of 8) across Discrepant andNonDiscrepant stories was then subjected to analyses

Interpretive theory of mind task

StimuliBlack-and-white line drawings were machine copied onto white cover stock and blankwhite covers with small rectangular windows similar to those used by Pillow andHenrichon (1996) were used as stimuli The covers and drawings were connected onthe edge so that they did not shift during presentation A small portion of the drawingwas visible through the window on the cover this portion was identical within each setof three drawings There were eight sets consisting of three drawings in each set Forsix sets (Change) the first and second drawings in the set were identical and the thirdwas different For two sets (NoChange) all three drawings in the set were identicalNoChange sets were included as a control to ensure that children did not expect thereto be a change on all trials but data from these sets were not analysed An example ofthe Change sets and the portion of the drawing revealed by the window is given in Fig3 and details of the drawings and portions visible for each trial are given in Appendix C

Figure 3 Sample drawings used in the interpretive task of Study 3


ProcedureEach child was introduced to the task in the following way lsquoWersquore going to play a gamewith our friend Pat (same doll as the one used in the crayon task) First wersquore going tohide Pat in the box so he (she) canrsquot see or hear anything wersquore doing because first itrsquosyour turn to play the game (Doll was put in the box) Can Pat see anything from here(All children agreed that Pat could not) Now Irsquom going to show you some pictures andI want you to tell me what you think is behind the little window Look at this one Whatkind of picture do you think is behind this window (The experimenter waited for thechild to reply and then opened the picture cover to reveal the drawing behind thewindow) Look itrsquos a (eg cat) There was a (eg cat) behind the window Now howabout this one (the second picture in the series was placed before the child) what doyou think is behind this one (The experimenter waited for the child to reply openedthe picture cover to reveal the drawing behind the window and named the depictedobject) And what about this one (the third picture in the series was placed before thechild) what do you think is behind this window (The experimenter waited for thechild to reply opened the picture cover to reveal the drawing behind the window andthen named the depicted object) OK you saw a (eg cat cat flower) thatrsquos neat Nowletrsquos get Pat out because wersquore going to do the same game with Pat (The experimenterplaced the same three covered drawings the child had just looked at on the table) Howabout this first one what will Pat think is behind the windowrsquo As with the child theexperimenter presented each picture asked the child what the doll would think wasbehind the window opened the cover and named the object The same script was usedfor all eight sets of three drawings The order of sets was randomized for each childwith the restriction that the third and sixth sets were always NoChange sets

ScoringChildren were awarded 1 point for each set of Change drawings for which theyattributed a biased interpretation to the puppet (ie said that the puppet would thinkthe third drawing was a house in the househouseshark sequence) and answered thereality question (ie what was really behind the window for the third drawing) for thatset correctly (ie shark for the househouseshark sequence) The total score (of 6) foreach child was then analysed

Results and discussion

Picture judgment taskChildrenrsquos number of correct responses was defined as a match between the emotionportrayed by the painting (as defined by artistrsquos judgments in the pilot study) and themood portrayed by the artist in the photo These data were analysed in a 3 Ages one-way ANOVA A significant main effect of Age F(2 34)= 2808 plt0001 was obtainedSeven-year-olds performed significantly better (M = 1100 SD = 095) than 5-year-olds(M = 915 SD = 153) who in turn performed better than 3-year-olds (M = 633SD = 206) As predicted 3-year-olds performed at chance level (t = 056) in the picturejudgment task whereas 5-and 7-year-olds were both above chance levels (t = 842plt001 for 5-year-olds and t = 1817 plt001 for 7-year-olds) Thus in contrast to theyoungest children 5- and 7-year-olds apparently match mood of artist to moodportrayed in the painting according to a one-to-one mapping rule Whether this


mapping rule is flexible and the child concedes that other non-direct relationships mayhold between artistsrsquo mood and product was addressed in the analysis of interview data(see below)

Crayon false belief taskNone of the 3-year-olds 1012 5-year-olds and 1212 7-year-olds passed the crayon falsebelief task The probabilities of these outcomes based on the binomial distribution(p = 50 for a passfail task) are 0002 (significant failure) for 3-year-olds 02(significant success) and 0002 (significant success) for 5- and 7-year-olds respectivelyThese findings are consistent with others in the literature for studies using this type offalse belief task (Perner et al 1987) There was no evidence that 3-year-olds consideredthe mental state of the other when making their judgments unlike 5- and 7-year-oldswho were close to ceiling on the task

Emotion false belief taskNumber of correct responses was analyzed in a 3 Ages one-way ANOVA There was asignificant main effect of age F(2 34) = 1695 plt001 As expected performance waspoor and equivalent for 3- (025) and 5-year-olds (077) in this task and significantlybetter for 7-year-olds (358) However and contrary to our expectations the groupmean was at chance for 7-year-olds and only two children performed significantly abovechance (48 in this task) It is not clear why children performed poorly Inspection ofthe reasons given for responses suggest that children in this age group were more likelyto give appropriate answers to the reality question (proportion of children givingappropriate answer = 73) than the appearance (32) or otherrsquos view (31) questionsThus it appears that our sample of 7-year-olds expressed a stage of transition not yetfully understanding the idea that people may be motivated to hide emotions as a meansof creating a false belief in others Although the two children who performed abovechance on the emotion task also responded affirmatively to all three questions in theinterview indicating a flexible view on the impact of the artistrsquos mood on the paintingit is not possible with only two children to assess whether childrenrsquos view of the mindbehind the symbol is related to reasoning underlying the emotion theory of mind task

Interpretive theory of mind taskA 3 Ages one-way ANOVA of childrenrsquos number of correct responses on the interpretivetheory of mind task revealed a significant effect of Age F(2 34) = 921 p lt 0006Three-year-olds (017) were equivalent to 5-year-olds (108) and both performed lesswell (p lt 05) than 7-year-olds (262) As with the emotion task none of the age groupswas performing above chance level (36) in the interpretive task However 512 7-year-olds were performing at 67 or above Again this may indicate that the 7-year-oldchildren in our sample are in a transition period not yet fully understanding that thesame experience can lead to different representations

Comparison of picture judgment to theory of mind tasksWe explored trends across tasks using contingency tables and chi-square analyses Thefollowing criteria for passing each task were employed Picture Judgment score of 9ndash12


(total possible = 12) Crayon False Belief score of 1 (total possible = 1) Emotion FalseBelief score of 6ndash8 (total possible = 8) Interpretive Theory of Mind score of 5ndash6 (totalpossible = 6) All passing scores were 75 or above Table 4 presents the number ofchildren passingfailing the picture judgment and theory of mind tasks Chi-squareanalysis of the contingency table contrasting picture with crayon tasks showed that asignificant majority of children either passed both tasks or failed both tasks Agrave2

(1) = 1655 plt001 suggesting a link between the mental state reasoning required inthese two tasks Very few children passed one task and failed the other In contrastcomparison of picture and emotion tasks revealed that children who failed the emotiontask were equally likely to pass or fail the picture task Agrave2 (1) = 342 ns Comparison ofpicture and interpretive tasks also indicated that a significant majority of children wereequally likely to pass or fail picture tasks when they had failed the interpretive task Agrave2

(1) = 151 ns

These results suggest that judging how artistsrsquo mental states affect the product(picture judgment task) may require reasoning about mental states that is akin to thatemployed when children infer that different experiences lead to different representa-tions of the world (Crayon false belief task) In both cases a one-to-one mapping ofmental state to behaviourproduct appears to be made It does not appear that thereasoning involved in judging the mind behind the symbol in the picture task relates tothe more sophisticated reasoning of the emotion and interpretive tasks In the lattertwo tasks the child must understand that there is not necessarily a one-to-one mappingbetween mental state and behaviour that people may hide emotions to create a falsebelief in others (emotion task) or that two people looking at the same bit of informationcould form different interpretations (interpretive task) If this understanding wasapplied to the picture task we would have children informing us that it was notpossible to tell which artist did a particular painting in effect reaching Goodmanrsquos(1968) point of realization that the emotion expressed resides in the symbol and not theartist In fact all children completed the task without challenging the instructions Toexplore further the limits of childrenrsquos view of the mind behind the symbol we lookedat interview data

InterviewWe asked three target questions of 5- and 7-year-olds in these interviews An affirmativeanswer in the second and third questions would reveal that children were developing a

Table 4 Number of children who passfail picture judgment compared with theory of mind tasks inStudy 3

Theory of Mind Task

Crayon Emotion InterpretivePass Fail Pass Fail Pass Fail

Picture taskPass 19 2 4 17 2 19Fail 4 12 0 16 0 15

Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


more flexible view of how the mental state of artists could influence the paintings theymake Table 5 presents the proportion of children at each age answering in theaffirmative to the questions When asked what sort of painting a happysad artist wouldpaint (Artist Mood) all 7-year-olds (p lt 0002 from binomial distribution) and ten 5-year-olds (p lt 02) responded that they would make paintings that matched their moodNote that this reasoning leads to success on the picture task and that if performance isconverted to proportions similar levels are found in both tasks (76 vs 83 for picturevs interview tasks for 5-year-olds and 92 vs 100 for picture vs interview tasks for7-year-olds) The second and third questions pushed the limits of childrenrsquos views

When asked in the second question whether those artists could make a painting thatwas opposite to their mood six 5-year-olds (p lt 23) and eight 7-year-olds (p lt 12)conceded that they could However when asked in the third question to name a happysad event they had experienced and then asked whether an artist could make a paintingthat was opposite to the feeling evoked by that event (Personally Relevant Subject)only one 5-year-old (p lt 002) and five 7-year-olds (p lt 19) believed they couldHowever when pushed a little further and asked whether the artist could do that if theywere very skilled six of the 5-year-olds (p lt 23) and seven of the 7-year-olds (p lt 19)conceded that they could Apparently most children felt that going against onersquosmental state in creating a painting would be a difficult thing to accomplish and they feltit was even more implausible if the artist was painting a subject that was personallyrelevant to the child Older children were more likely to believe that under certaincircumstances (high levels of skill) it was possible

Of the four children who passed the emotion task (all were 7-year-olds) all alsoagreed in the interview that painters could make paintings opposite in mood to the onethey felt Only two children (both 7-year-olds) passed both the emotion and interpretivetasks In both cases the children exhibited a flexible view of the mind behind thesymbol in their answers to interview questions (ie answered affirmatively to secondand third questions) Although these relationships supports our prediction that childrenwho have a more sophisticated theory of mind would also have a flexible view of therelationship between mental state of artist and the product they make it can only besuggestive until more individuals having an advanced theory of mind are studied

GENERAL DISCUSSIONThree studies explored the emergence of an ability in young children to reason abouthow artists may leave a trace of their attributes in the visual symbols they produce InStudies 1 and 2 we presented children with simple line drawings and asked them tomake judgments about the idiosyncrasies of the artist who produced them In Study 3

Table 5 Proportion of children answering affirmatively to interview questions in Study 3

Question 5 Years 7 Years

1 Artistrsquos Mood 79 1002 Opposite Mood 63 673 Relevant Subject 21 293a With Skill 46 79


we presented children with copies of museum art again asking them to judge paintingson the basis of the attributes of the artist We found that in general beyond 4 yearschildren were increasingly able to differentiate between pictures on the basis of avariety of human qualities including sentience age level affective style and emotion

In Study 1 childrenrsquos informal remarks about the drawings suggested that they basedtheir judgments of the link between artistsrsquo attributes and pictures on a sensitivity andprocessing of specific features of the drawings such as the quality of the line whether itformed a smooth continuous curve or was choppy or unsteady and whether the linesuccessfully enclosed the form without gaps or overlaps Results of the first studyclearly indicated that from 5 years children begin to have a clear sense of the relationbetween the experience and skill of the artist and their graphic production Moreresearch is needed to decide whether this development is linked not only to a newsense of others (eg emerging theories of mind) but also to the development ofaesthetic judgments in particular judgments of relative beauty an important topic wedid not address here

In Study 2 we varied affective style isolating a number of factors that naDaggerve adultsassociated with drawings produced by calm or agitated artists and found that childrenwere also sensitive to these factors In general precision was valued and used as acriterion of differentiation by children This finding corroborates research showing thatyoung children prefer realist over more abstract artistic productions (eg Freeman1993b Parsons 1987) However considering the variety of artistic styles acrosscultures questions remain as to whether precision is a universal value in thedevelopment of art appreciation and understanding These questions should beaddressed with further cross-cultural studies

Study 3 was a first attempt to explore the relationship between mental statereasoning with visual symbols and theory of mind tasks Consistent with the existingliterature we found that prior to 4 years children did not show evidence of mentalstate reasoning in any of the four tasks (picture crayon emotion interpretive) Incontrast 5- and 7-year-olds pass picture and crayon tasks but not emotion andinterpretive tasks We proposed that the one-to-one framework of mental statereasoning is a common thread between picture and crayon tasks and that thisframework indexes a first step of mental state understanding Thus we suggest that atthe onset of mental state understanding children presented with the crayon false belieftask believe that the experiences of the protagonist in the story will be directly reflectedin their beliefs in a one-to-one manner (ie crayons are usually found in crayon boxesand so in this particular crayon box there are crayons) Likewise at this early state ofunderstanding children believe that the artistsrsquo moods will be directly reflected in themood portrayed in the drawings they make (ie happy artists make happy drawings)We did not find that 7-year-olds performed well on the more advanced theory of mindtasks (ie emotion and interpretive) Very few children in our sample manifested themore sophisticated view of mind that was tapped by the emotion and interpretive tasksThe few who did however also showed a more sophisticated understanding of themind behind the symbol ndash they conceded that although the artistrsquos mood would likelybe reflected in the symbol it would not necessarily be so Extending the age rangestudied would help to confirm the interpretation of the developmental trend that issuggested by the present findings

Our findings support the contention made by Freeman (1993ab Freeman amp Sanger1993) and Browne and Wolley (2001) suggesting that children reason about the role ofthe artist relatively late compared with using pictures as symbols in a variety of tasks


(eg Callaghan 1999 2000a DeLoache 1991 DeLoache et al 1997) We propose thatthis lag is probably due to differential demands of the tasks In tasks asking children touse pictures as symbols the child needs to match relevant information from the symbolto the referent When the match is direct as in Callaghan (2000a) in which 3-year-oldchildren match realistic drawings to the objects depicted symbol use emerges earlierthan when the match is indirect as in Callaghan (2000b) in which 5-year-old childreninfer emotions portrayed in paintings

Our claim is that in the picture judgment task used here contrary to previous visualsymbol tasks the child also needed to make an inference Specifically an inference ofhow the mental state of the artist could translate into pictorial qualities However itcould be argued that children could make a low-level judgment of the picturespresented in this series for example by simply distinguishing the positivenegativevalence For example the child may gloss the adult machine calm and happy picturesas good or positive and the child agitated and sad pictures as bad or negative Toeliminate this explanation we asked fifteen 3-year-olds to judge a sample of 24 picturesdrawn from the stimulus sets of Studies 1 and 2 The pictures were presented in pairsthat contrasted either the child with adult drawing of an object or the calm withagitated baseline drawing of an object In one pass through the set children were askedto find the lsquogoodrsquo drawing and in the second pass they were asked to find the lsquobadrsquodrawing with order counterbalanced across children Mean proportion correct was 89for lsquogoodrsquo judgments and 78 for lsquobadrsquo judgments This finding suggests that if they weremaking a low-level judgment of valence in our studies 3-year-old children in our studieswould have performed much better that they did (52 in Study 1 50 in Study 2 and 53in Study 3) Taken together the findings from this follow-up study the consistentlypoor performance of young children across these three studies and the links found toearly mental state reasoning in theory of mind and interview data in Study 3 convergeon an interpretation that we have tapped childrenrsquos developing ability to keepattributes of the artist in mind when making judgments of pictures

The inference of the mental state of the artist required by our task may also explainwhy our results do not fit with the view that even 3-year-olds consider intentions of theartist when naming pictures (Bloom amp Markson 1998 Gelman amp Ebeling 1998) In thenaming studies the intentions of the artist are explicitly told to children before theymake their judgments and as long as intentions do not conflict with resemblance(Browne amp Wolley 2001) they use this information when naming drawings In order todetermine the limits of childrenrsquos pictorial reasoning future research will need tocarefully identify the sources of support provided to children when they makejudgments of how the artist influences the trace Our findings with the three picturetasks employed here suggest that when children begin to show solid causal mental statereasoning (around 4ndash5 years) they also begin to make judgments of how the mind ofthe artist is reflected in their productions We believe that just as with theory of mindthere is room for considerable refinement of childrenrsquos view on the mind behind thesymbol Future research needs to extend the age range and the cultural group studied toexplore the nature of this refinement


AcknowledgmentsThis research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canadagrant to both authors We thank the children and students for their participation and the parentsand daycare staff for their cooperation

ReferencesArnheim R (1974) Art and visual perception A psychology for the creative eye Los Angeles

University of California PressBloom P amp Markson L (1998) Intention and analogy in childrenrsquos naming of pictorial

representations Psychological Science 9 200ndash204Browne C A amp Wooley J D (2001) Theory of mind in childrenrsquos naming of drawings Journal

of Cognition and Development 2 389ndash412Callaghan T C (1997) Childrenrsquos judgments of emotion portrayed in museum art British

Journal of Developmental Psychology 15 515ndash529Callaghan T C (1999) Early understanding and production of graphic symbols Child

Development 70 1314ndash1324Callaghan T C (2000a) Factors affecting graphic symbol understanding in the third year

Language similarity and iconicity Cognitive Development 15(2) 207ndash236Callaghan T C (2000b) Preschoolersrsquo judgments of emotion in museum art British Journal of

Developmental Psychology 18 465ndash474Carouthers T amp Gardner H (1979) When childrenrsquos drawings become art The emergence of

aesthetic production and perception Developmental Psychology 15 570ndash580Chandler M amp LaLonde C (1996) Shifting to an interpretive theory of mind 5- to 7-year-oldsrsquo

changing conceptions of mental life In A Sameroff amp M Haith (Eds) The five to seven yearshift The age of reason and responsibility Chicago University of Chicago Press

DeLoache J S (1991) Symbolic functioning in very young children Understanding pictures andmodels Child Development 62 736ndash752

DeLoache J S amp Burns N M (1994) Early understanding of the representational function ofpictures Cognition 52 83ndash110

DeLoache J S Pierroutsakos S L amp Troseth G L (1997) The three rrsquos of pictorialcompetence In R Vasta (Ed) Annals of child development (Vol 12 pp 1ndash48) LondonJessica Kingsley

Freeman N H (1993a) Drawing Public instruments of representation In C Pratt amp A F Garton(Eds) Systems of representation in children Development and use New York Wiley

Freeman N H (1993b) Theory of mind theory of pictures A conceptual advance inchildhood Paper presented at the VIIIth Congresso Nazionale Divisione Psicologia delloSviluppo Roma

Freeman N H (1995) The emergence of a theory of pictorial reasoning In C Lange-Kuttner ampG V Thomas (Eds) Drawing and looking Theoretical approaches to pictorial representa-tion in children London Harvester Wheatsheaf

Freeman N H amp Sanger D (1993) Language and belief in critical thinking Emergingexplanations of pictures Exceptionality Education Canada 3(3) 43ndash58

Gardner H (1973) The arts and human development New York Basic BooksGelman S A amp Ebeling K S (1998) Shape and representational status in childrenrsquos early

naming Cognition 66 35ndash47Goodman N (1968) Languages of art An approach to a theory of symbols New York Bobbs-

MerrillGross D amp Harris P L (1988) False beliefs about emotion Childrenrsquos understanding of

misleading emotional displays International Journal of Behavioral Development 11(4)475ndash488


Harris P L (1983) Childrenrsquos understanding of the link between situation and emotion Journalof Experimental Child Psychology 36 490ndash509

Harris P L (1989) Children and emotion The development of psychological understandingOxford Blackwell

Harris P L Donnelly K Guz G R amp Pitt-Watson R (1986) Childrenrsquos understanding of thedistinction between real and apparent emotion Child Development 57 895ndash909

Harris P L Johnson C N Hutton D Andrews D amp Cook T (1989) Young childrenrsquos theoryof mind and emotion Cognition and Emotion 3 379ndash400

Harris P L Kavanaugh R D amp Dowson L (1997) The depiction of imaginary transformationsEarly comprehension of a symbolic function Cognitive Development 12 1ndash19

Jolley R P amp Thomas G V (1994) The development of sensitivity to metaphorical expressionof moods in abstract art Educational Psychology 14 437ndash450

Karmiloff-Smith A (1992) Beyond modularity A developmental perspective on cognitivescience Cambridge MA MIT Press

Kirk R (1968) Experimental design Procedures for the behavioral sciences Belmont CABrooksCole Publishing

Langer S K (1953) Feeling and form New York ScribnerrsquosNye R Thomas G V amp Robinson E (1995) Childrenrsquos understanding about pictures In C

Lange-Kuttner amp G V Thomas (Eds) Drawing and looking Theoretical approaches topictorial representation in children London Harvester Wheatsheaf

Parsons M (1987) How we understand art A cognitive developmental account of aestheticexperience Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Perner J (1991) Understanding the representational mind Cambridge MA MIT PressPerner J Leekham S R amp Wimmer H (1987) Three-year-oldsrsquo difficulty with false belief The

case for a conceptual deficit British Journal of Developmental Psychology 5 125ndash137Pillow B H amp Henrichon A J (1996) Therersquos more to the picture than meets the eye Young

childrenrsquos difficulty understanding biased interpretation Child Development 67 803ndash819Robinson E Thomas G V amp Nye R (1994) Childrenrsquos conceptions of the relationship

between pictures and their referents Cognitive Development 9 165ndash191Russell J A amp Bullock M (1985) Multidimensional scaling of emotional facial expressions

Similarities from preschoolers to adults Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 481290ndash1298

Thomas G V Nye L amp Robinson E (1994) How children view pictures Childrenrsquos responsesto pictures as things in themselves and as representations of something else CognitiveDevelopment 9 141ndash144

Wimmer H amp Perner J (1983) Beliefs about beliefs Representation and constraining functionof wrong beliefs in young childrenrsquos understanding of deception Cognition 13 103ndash128

Winner E (1982) Invented worlds The psychology of the arts Cambridge MA HarvardUniversity Press

Winner E Blank P Massey C amp Gardner H (1983) Childrenrsquos sensitivity to aestheticproperties of line drawings In D Rogers amp J A Sloboda (Eds) The acquisition of symbolicskills (pp 97ndash104) New York Plenum

Winner E Rosenblatt E Windmueller G Davidson L amp Gardner H (1986) Childrenrsquosperception of lsquoaestheticrsquo properties of the arts Domain-specific or pan-artistic British Journalof Developmental Psychology 4 149ndash160

Received 28 February 2002 revised version received 11 November 2002


Appendix A

Painting reproductions used as stimuli in Study 3

Happy emotion paintings

(1) Gouache by Alexander Calder 1973(2) The Red Boats Argenteuil by Claude Monet 1875(3) Autumn Landscape Murnau by Vasily Kandinsky 1908(4) Spring in France by Robert William Vonnoh 1890(5) The Pigeons by Pablo Picasso 1957(6) Untitled by Alexander Calder 1964

Sad emotion paintings(7) Painting Number 2 by Franz Kline 1954(8) Rain by Vincent VanGogh 1889(9) Black Cross New Mexico by Georgia OrsquoKeefe 1929(10) Burning of the Houses of Parliament by Joseph Mallord William Turner c

1835(11) Snowfield Morning Roxbury by John LaFarge 1864(12) Royal Dirge by Robert Motherwell 1972

Appendix B

Stories and sample questions used in emotion false belief task of Study 3

Discrepant(1) Diana is playing a game with her friend At the end of the game Diana wins and

her friend loses Diana tries to hide how she feels because otherwise her friendwonrsquot play with her anymoreMemory Q1 What happened at the end of the gameMemory Q2 What will Dianarsquos friend do if she knows how Diana feelsReality Q How does Diana really feel when she wins the game Does she reallyfeel happy sad or just OK WhyAppearance Q So Diana really feels (childrsquos response) when she wins the gameHow does she look on her face when she wins the game Does she look the sameway or a different way Does she look happy sad or just ok on her face WhyOtherrsquos view Q So Diana really feels (childrsquos response) and she looks (childrsquosresponse) on her face What about her friend Does her friend think Diana ishappy sad or just OK Why

(2) Diana and her friends are playing together One of the oldest children squirtsDiana with a squirt gun right in the face Everyone else laughs but Diana doesnrsquotthink it is funny Diana knows that the other children will say shersquos a baby if sheshows them how she really feels So Diana tries to hide how she really feels

(3) Diana sees a big boy picking on a little boy Suddenly the big boy runs pastDiana really fast Then the big boy trips and falls Diana thinks that itrsquos funny Butshe doesnrsquot want the boy to know how she feels in case he picks on her too

(4) Diana is walking down the street when an old lady walks past her The old lady is


wearing funny clothes Diana tries to hide the way she feels when she sees theold ladyrsquos funny clothes otherwise the old lady might be cross with her

NonDiscrepant(5) Diana is getting ready for school but she has a sore tummy Diana knows that if

she shows her mommy how she really feels her mommy will let her stay homefrom school So Diana lets her mom know how she feels

(6) Dianarsquos daddy is coming home from a long trip Her mom is going to get him atthe airport and Diana really wants to go Diana knows that if she shows hermother how she really feels she will let her come to the airport too So Diana letsher mom know how she feels

(7) Diana is shopping with her mom for a birthday present for her friend They finda really cool toy for her friend that Diana likes a lot Diana knows that is sheshows her mom how she feels her mom will buy her a toy too So Diana lets hermom know how she feels

(8) Diana is eating dinner with her granny but Diana doesnrsquot like the food hergranny made Diana knows that if she shows her granny how she really feelsabout the food her granny will give her something else to eat So Diana lets hergranny know how she really feels

Appendix C

Details of drawings used in the interpretive task of Study 3

Full View Restricted view

Drawing 1 Drawing 2 Drawing 3

Change sets(1) House House Shark Triangle (roof fin)(2) Elephant Elephant Firefighter Open Rectangle (end of trunkhose)(3) Truck Truck Balloons Quarter Circle (wheel balloon)(4) Mouse Mouse Rhinoceros Curved spike (tip of tailhorn)(5) Tiger Tiger Butterfly ZigZag Stripes(fur wing pattern)(6) Cat Cat Flower Pointed Oval (ear petal)

NoChange sets(7) Tree Tree Tree Straight parallel lines (trunk)(8) Snake Snake Snake Curved parallel lines (body segment)


Most philosophers agree that expression is one of the primary functions of art (Langer1953) and concur with the dominant view that there is no necessary relation betweenthe mental state of the artist and the expression of a mental state in a particular painting(Arnheim 1974 Goodman 1968) The property of expression is seen to reside in thestructural qualities of the symbol itself This is a sophisticated understanding of visualsymbols that is like Kohlbergrsquos Stage 5 of moral reasoning rarely found For mostchildren and young adults visual symbols such as paintings and photographs are notonly about objects and events in the world they are also about the persons whoproduce them (Freeman 1993ab 1995 Parsons 1987) Symbolic communication has adual function to specify about the world out there (ie the referents) as well as aboutthe mind behind the symbols (ie the mental state of the symbol maker) In order tounderstand the multiple layers of meanings in visual symbols the child needs to hold inmind the obvious meaning of the symbol and update that with meaningful informationfrom the visual symbol itself (eg colours line quality) as well as from inferences aboutthe mental state of the person who made the symbol (eg intentions emotionsdesires) At the core of this understanding is the knowledge that people create differentsymbols based on different communicative intentions In this research we focus on thedevelopment of this understanding and the links between it and other forms of socialcognition in early childhood

Freeman (1995) captures the complexity of visual symbol understanding in a modelsuggesting that mature pictorial reasoning involves an ability to map a complexintentional network that links pictures to three components the real or imagined worldthat they represent (ie the referent) the mind of the artist and the mind of thebeholder From this perspective the meaning derived from a pictorial symbol may shiftover development according to which aspect or aspects of the intentional network(referent artist beholder) are being considered by the child at that time Although weknow something about the development of childrenrsquos understanding of the linkbetween pictures and their referents we know little about the correspondingdevelopment in their reasoning about the roles of the artist or the beholder Theresearch reported here is exploratory in its investigation of the development of the firstof these relatively neglected aspects of the symbolic process We ask when childrenbegin to infer artistsrsquo states of mind from their graphic productions and how thisprocess of inference relates to the development of theories of mind a process that likepictorial reasoning involves an inference of how the mind will affect outcome Webegin with a review of what is known about the development of childrenrsquos pictorialreasoning about the links between pictures and referents beholders and artists

Pictures can be linked to their referents directly as in using a photograph to indicatewhich of two items to choose or indirectly as in using a photograph of studentprotesters to convey the idea of freedom and rebellion Sometime around their thirdbirthday children are able to use pictures having a direct correspondence to referentsto guide their responding in a variety of tasks (Callaghan 1999 2000a DeLoache 1991DeLoache amp Burns 1994 DeLoache Pierroutsakos amp Troseth 1997 HarrisKavanaugh amp Dowson 1997 Thomas Nye amp Robinson 1994) Sometime aroundtheir fifth birthday children are able to make judgments about the emotion portrayed inabstract paintings (Callaghan 1997) hence deriving meaning when there is an indirectcorrespondence between symbol and referent and can accomplish this at 3 years whenscaffolded by an adult who models these judgments (Callaghan 2000b) When probingthe limits of this understanding of the relation between picture and referent Thomasand his colleagues (Nye Thomas amp Robinson 1995 Robinson Nye amp Thomas 1994



















Method












Type of contrast


2 years M 363 413 431 444 400 438 415SD 108 131 120 131 145 159

3 years M 443 363 444 375 413 438 413SD 150 115 155 153 213 196

4 years M 400 438 463 569 513 500 480SD 197 282 310 154 260 288

5 years M 488 563 581 563 569 550 549SD 200 290 308 213 296 310

M 419 444 480 488 473 481












Method












Emotion

Calm Agitated


3 years M 53 57 46 43 50SD 16 17 19 13

5 years M 94 84 93 74 86SD 07 08 13 18M 73 71 70 58






Feature contrast



SD 12 14 05 11 13Agitated M 16 19 19 23 16 18

SD 14 13 09 11 145 years Calm M 40 39 36 39 34 38

SD 00 03 06 03 06Agitated M 39 29 36 38 35 37

SD 03 04 06 04 06


SD 09 13 11 095 years M 30 31 29 35 31

SD 12 08 09 08

























Interview task




































(1) = 151 ns




Theory of Mind Task



Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C
























Method












Type of contrast


2 years M 363 413 431 444 400 438 415SD 108 131 120 131 145 159

3 years M 443 363 444 375 413 438 413SD 150 115 155 153 213 196

4 years M 400 438 463 569 513 500 480SD 197 282 310 154 260 288

5 years M 488 563 581 563 569 550 549SD 200 290 308 213 296 310

M 419 444 480 488 473 481












Method












Emotion

Calm Agitated


3 years M 53 57 46 43 50SD 16 17 19 13

5 years M 94 84 93 74 86SD 07 08 13 18M 73 71 70 58






Feature contrast



SD 12 14 05 11 13Agitated M 16 19 19 23 16 18

SD 14 13 09 11 145 years Calm M 40 39 36 39 34 38

SD 00 03 06 03 06Agitated M 39 29 36 38 35 37

SD 03 04 06 04 06


SD 09 13 11 095 years M 30 31 29 35 31

SD 12 08 09 08

























Interview task




































(1) = 151 ns




Theory of Mind Task



Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C















Type of contrast


2 years M 363 413 431 444 400 438 415SD 108 131 120 131 145 159

3 years M 443 363 444 375 413 438 413SD 150 115 155 153 213 196

4 years M 400 438 463 569 513 500 480SD 197 282 310 154 260 288

5 years M 488 563 581 563 569 550 549SD 200 290 308 213 296 310

M 419 444 480 488 473 481












Method












Emotion

Calm Agitated


3 years M 53 57 46 43 50SD 16 17 19 13

5 years M 94 84 93 74 86SD 07 08 13 18M 73 71 70 58






Feature contrast



SD 12 14 05 11 13Agitated M 16 19 19 23 16 18

SD 14 13 09 11 145 years Calm M 40 39 36 39 34 38

SD 00 03 06 03 06Agitated M 39 29 36 38 35 37

SD 03 04 06 04 06


SD 09 13 11 095 years M 30 31 29 35 31

SD 12 08 09 08

























Interview task




































(1) = 151 ns




Theory of Mind Task



Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C

















Method












Emotion

Calm Agitated


3 years M 53 57 46 43 50SD 16 17 19 13

5 years M 94 84 93 74 86SD 07 08 13 18M 73 71 70 58






Feature contrast



SD 12 14 05 11 13Agitated M 16 19 19 23 16 18

SD 14 13 09 11 145 years Calm M 40 39 36 39 34 38

SD 00 03 06 03 06Agitated M 39 29 36 38 35 37

SD 03 04 06 04 06


SD 09 13 11 095 years M 30 31 29 35 31

SD 12 08 09 08

























Interview task




































(1) = 151 ns




Theory of Mind Task



Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C














Emotion

Calm Agitated


3 years M 53 57 46 43 50SD 16 17 19 13

5 years M 94 84 93 74 86SD 07 08 13 18M 73 71 70 58






Feature contrast



SD 12 14 05 11 13Agitated M 16 19 19 23 16 18

SD 14 13 09 11 145 years Calm M 40 39 36 39 34 38

SD 00 03 06 03 06Agitated M 39 29 36 38 35 37

SD 03 04 06 04 06


SD 09 13 11 095 years M 30 31 29 35 31

SD 12 08 09 08

























Interview task




































(1) = 151 ns




Theory of Mind Task



Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C











Feature contrast



SD 12 14 05 11 13Agitated M 16 19 19 23 16 18

SD 14 13 09 11 145 years Calm M 40 39 36 39 34 38

SD 00 03 06 03 06Agitated M 39 29 36 38 35 37

SD 03 04 06 04 06


SD 09 13 11 095 years M 30 31 29 35 31

SD 12 08 09 08

























Interview task




































(1) = 151 ns




Theory of Mind Task



Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C






























Interview task




































(1) = 151 ns




Theory of Mind Task



Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C
































(1) = 151 ns




Theory of Mind Task



Agrave2 1655 plt001 342 ns 151 ns


































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C







































































Appendix A






Appendix B














Appendix C













Appendix C







traces of the artist: sensitivity to the role of the artist in children' s … ·...

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