Constraints on changes in Representations during development
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Project Report
ABSTRACT
A child builds representation of the objects through their exposure or related events a no of times. Children's drawing are used as tool to study constraints on internal representational changes that are encountered by a child during its development, these constraints are implicitly build during development, but during different phases of development different constraints are called with different intensities. 143 students between the age group of 4 to 12 years were asked to draw a tree and then to draw a tree that does not exist, similar procedure was called for human (boy/girl), animal and house. This method of experiment made children to re-operate on their mastered representation and bring about changes in the representation of a house, animal, tree and human being which will account for their non existence. Changes introduced by children of age group 4 to 7 were found to be greatly different from that of children from 8 to 12 yrs, these younger group tended to bring about more of those changes that did not interrupted there sequential process that is they brought about changes towards the end where as this was not generally the case found among the older group they brought about changes in the middle of their mastered processes. Younger children brought about changes in shape and size of elements and went with deleting where as older came up with insertion from cross category bringing about changes in position and orientation of elements.
Results
1) Size and or shape of some or many elements of "Y" changed 2) Size and or shape of complete object changed 3) Certain elements were deleted 4) Certain elements were added 5) Orientation of elements or whole changed/positions of elements swapped 6) Cross category addition of elementsOlder children deleted in the middle of their drawing procedure where as younger one tended to delete at the end
Similar trend was noted in the manner of insertion shown by younger children who added elements at the end of the drawing procedure like addition of smiley face to the house instead of adding in the midway of their drawing procedure as done by older children e.g. by making two faces on one human body