Abstract:
Whilst children's drawings provide evidence of artistic abilities to parents and teachers, to cognitive developmental psychologists they are a window to understanding developing minds. In this thesis, children's imaginative drawings were used as data for examining the development of representational flexibility through the process of redescription (Karmiloff-Smith, 1990, 1992). Redescription is the internal system generated process where knowledge that is initially present or learnt (encoded as implicit adjunctions) is reconfigured into more flexible higher-order formats. Extant work suggests that examples and task instructions can lead to improved representational flexibility in young children. Such findings have led some researchers to suggest that what develops is children's information processing skills in generating appropriate imaginative responses rather than qualitative changes in knowledge formats. However, Karmiloff-Smith's redescription model maintains that even when young children benefit from examples and instructions, their minds still have to go beyond success. Only then would children spontaneously attempt ideas that innovatively elaborate upon the original learning context. In a series of studies, the present thesis examined how examples of imaginative drawings affected children's representational flexibility. In Study 1, it was found that priming young children with a variety of imaginative high-level drawing solutions led them to only reproduce those very solutions. Even when those solutions led young children to attempt making pictures that required flexible mid-procedure interruptions, over time, these participants reverted to drawing in procedurally rigid ways. It was only older children who were able to reliably go beyond the features of the example primes and also draw with mid-sequence interruptions across time. Similar findings were observed even in qualitative micro-genetic drawing-by-drawing analyses. These results were maintained regardless of attempts to instruct children to explicitly diverge from the example primes (Study 2) and regardless of multiple drawing opportunities (Study 3). These developmental findings confirm theoretical expectations of Karmiloff-Smith's redescription model that even though young children benefit from externally introduced input, that input is initially stored as adjunctions, and developmental time is required before they are differentiated into more explicit knowledge formats that are available to the mind. In Study 4, a neural network computer simulation of micro-genetic findings from the previous studies is performed to suggest how dynamic inter-neuronal inhibition could potentially yield the redescription process of making available sparser knowledge representations that can flexibly integrate across diverse problem solving solutions. Overall, the four studies in this thesis provide new evidence to show that children need to go beyond acting as problem solvers to become problem generators.
