Picture-plane bias in children's representational drawing

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Abstract
The study of representational picture‐production by children was one of the founding disciplines of experimental child psychology. Today there are only traces of the tradition left as far as one important aspect is concerned. That is the problem of how biasses are generated when children look for cues on the picture‐plane. In order to study the problem it is necessary empirically to distinguish between those biasses and others which may be a product of how the child responds to the scene that the picture is supposed to represent. Two methods of analysing the problem are discussed. One is by maintaining what the picture is supposed to represent and providing solutions of the projective problem. The other method is to maintain the picture‐plane configuration and progressively to complicate the scenes which are represented. By such an approach it is easy to generate empirical effects, but the direction of error seems to be subject to dramatic swings. This may possibly be more characteristic of 3D homographs than of 2D homographs and abstract isographs.