Children's Drawings and Geometric Universals: How to Explain Them?
Abstract
In addition to examining the transcultural diversity of geometric signs, across cultures as well as history, the analysis of children's drawings provides a third route to the spontaneous geometric representations of the human species. From the earliest age, these drawings, though lacking strict resemblance to the model that inspires them, betray abstract thought. The child, says Goodenough, draws what he knows, not what he sees. As Luquet notes, the child goes through a phase of " intellectual realism ", during which his drawings do reproduce the various parts of an object or body and their syntax, but symbolize them with abstract geometric shapes.
