Project Proposal

Sonal Kumari

GENERAL CONSTRAINTS ON REPRESENTATINAL CHANGE

INTRODUCTION

I will focus on general constraints on representational changes that take place in child mind with development and how flexible the child is to these changes. I will be using children drawing as a depiction of what is there internal representation and how this representation develops with time.

Development of these representations is based on three main processes of learning namely:

1. To have innate knowledge and representation about the matter owing to evolutionary process

2. To draw representation on its own owing to interaction with the physical and socio-cultural surrounding.

3. To use complete existing knowledge already present and bring about new representation, which means to get into the process of representational changes.

This model of learning dealt in 3. States a hypothesis that knowledge is first acquired sequentially in a procedural, and then this acquired knowledge becomes available to other parts of the cognitive processes as data. It is also to be kept in mind that initially newly described representation of knowledge is restricted both with inter and intra domain flexibility.

SUBJECTS

Children within the age group 4 to 11, whose drawing levels were in cooperation with their age norms and doesn’t have any motor or planning problems which could be judged by asking these children to draw copies of four geometric form.

METHOD

Each subject will be asked to draw a house, an animal, a man. And after that they will be asked to draw a similar thing that does not exist. The complete analysis of these drawings will enable us to get the desired results.

Further experiments were done to check that whether the absence of certain changes made by a particular group is due to lack of awareness, these groups were asked to explicitly draw images that do not exist like image of a house with wing and 2 headed man. The process used by different age group children varied in earlier experiments.

We will duplicate these already done experiments (1) with a live video footage of our subjects at work so that we can get more precise methodical knowledge which our subjects adhere to and come up with better inferences.

I would also like to add another dimension to the experiment by considering different socio cultural background of the subjects which could be Inco-operated by extending the domain of subject to different categories mainly with economically well-equipped and not so well equipped families children, and bringing about changes in kind of drawing asked to be drawn by them, and looking into different detailing of their drawing.

EXPECTED OUTCOME

We expect to see some difference in the way subjects of different age groups chooses to represent their internal representation through drawing as they are asked to redirect their present way of representation to a new or somewhat related area.

As younger subjects are expected to be less flexible and hence the changes they will bring will be as a result of procedure which will require lesser flexibility, e.g. like changes in the end of the procedure with respect to in the middle, whereas older subjects are expected to become more flexible over time of development as the process of knowledge acquiring states, and hence shows changes which calls for more flexible procedure like changes in the middle of the procedure and then using back the pre rediscribed representation of data.

REFERENCE

1) Constraints on representational changes: Evidence from children's drawing by ANNETTE KARMILOFF-SMITH, MRC Cognitive Development Unit, London.