The development process of encoding characteristics in children's drawings

The present study explored children's cognitive development through their drawings. One hundred and fifty-two children aged from 4- to 7-years old participated the study. The participants were asked to copy familiar models-- a tea-pot and a flat wooden animal. Differed from the past studies, we present the models' canonical orientation to children directly when they were drawing. The results indicated that there are three kinds of encoding forms in children’s drawings: separate representation, canonical representation and visual realistic representation. Different aged children have different dominant representation forms. The changing of the encoding forms is a dynamic development process