New research from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has offered concrete insight into the development of children's psyches, and also made suggestions for educators to improve children's cognitive, spatial, and artistic abilities through the medium of painting.
Painting is a recreational and creative activity enjoyed by children across the world. However, children's paintings also serve as crucial artefacts of their perceptions, as they contain the sum of what children see as "essential". The spatial relationships between objects in paintings represent painters' experiences and technical prowess and tend to indicate shortcomings of either. These are often perceived by viewers of paintings, but until now, detailed evaluation and analysis of children's art have been subjective, relying on the trained eye of an artist or critic.
JAIST researchers Lan Yu and Yukari Nagai have developed and tested a digital analysis process by which children's paintings can be digitised, categorised, and then thoroughly analysed. Content, scale, patterns, details, and the relationships between objects in the paintings are objectively quantified and calculated.
Trends identified among the subjects sampled, 182 girls and 234 boys in the Republic of China, indicate that children who have not received instruction display poor abilities to recognise and emulate spatial relationships.
The younger the painter, the less likely that he or she will have developed these cognitive abilities. Lack of detail and inability to imitate objects is identified as common to children's painting. Statistical analysis of the boys and girls in this study indicated that they have different attitudes toward painting; girls preferred participating in painting more than boys did.