This study aims at investigating representational flexibility in children’s drawing behaviour and the extent to which changes introduced are related to age and can be induced by contextual manipulations. Children’s drawings of homes have been studied to determinate when and how children become capable to differentiate their pictorial products in response to different pictorial instructions. The study was conducted on 99 subjects, aged between 6 and 10 years old. A specific coding system was developed to detect strategies of deviations from canonicity. The results indicate that flexibility improves with ages and that older children are more capable to use more complex pictorial strategies of differentiations than younger children.
Keywords: Drawing, cognitive development, representational change, task’s influence

M. Camilloni, D. de Bernart, G. Pinto, The development of representational flexibility in children’s drawings: the influence of task in "RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA " 2/2011, pp. 151-170, DOI:10.3280/RIP2011-002001