Strategies in the reproduction of geometric figures: a developmental analysis

The thesis examines one important area of the skills that underlie the development of non-representational graphic ability, namely the strategies used by children and adults when reproducing geometric figure stimuli in a variety of test conditions. A review of the experimental literature in this area revealed a number of methodological weaknesses in previous studies, which included the failure to control for the precise nature of the figure stimuli presented to subjects and the need to employ more rigorous methods of assessing accuracy of reproduction. The five studies in the thesis take these criticisms into account by careful attention to the nature of the stimuli and to the methods used to classify copying strategies. The findings of the studies can be summarized as follows; with age comes an increasing consistency in the tendency to employ, uniform stroke directions when copying simple figures, and to isolate and draw as complete units 'good' parts of more complex figures. Differences in the accuracy of copying, as in well as the sorts of strategies used, are found as a function of age, stimulus complexity, and the presence or absence of a delay between the perception and reproduction of each stimulus