Fine Motor Skills and Unsystematic Spatial Binding in the Common Region Test: Under-Inclusivity in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Over-Inclusivity in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Introduction: The Common Region Test (CRT) is useful for predicting children’s visual memory as individual object-place binding predicted better object memory while objects-region coding predicted better place memory. Aim: To test children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with regards to spatial binding in the CRT. Methods: 19 children with ASD and 20 children with ADHD were gender-matched with 39 typically developing children by chronological age and with another 39 children by verbal mental age as control groups (N = 117) and tested with the CRT and Bender Gestalt test. Results: Children with ASD and ADHD showed more unsystematic coding than typically developing children. This was due to lower fine motor skills, and in children with ADHD also because of reduced verbal naming. Almost all children with ASD presented the less mature under-inclusive Type I unsystematic coding which included object-place binding, while children with ADHD showed the over-inclusive Type II unsystematic coding that was overriding the Gestalt-like properties of proximity and similarity. Conclusions: It was demonstrated that the CRT is a useful screening instrument for ASD and ADHD that shows that their spatial categorization varies in their unsystematic visuo-spatial classification due to fine motor skill deficiencies.

On Being in the Wrong Place: The Role of Children's Conceptual Understanding and Ballgame Experience when Judging a Football Player's Offside Position

We investigated the role of children's conceptual understanding and ballgame experience when judging whether a football player is in an offside position, or not. In the offside position, a player takes advantage of being behind the defence line of the opposing team and just waits for the ball to arrive in order to score a goal. We explained the offside rule to 7- and 9-year-old children with a Subbuteo setup. They produced drawings of an offside position until it was correct (drawing to criterion). Thereafter, children judged whether a designated player was in an offside position in a computerized task. Like adults, also children found it easier to judge when a player was in a wrong rather than a right place. Only when including frequency of ballgame practice in the analysis it was revealed that boys were better independently of age as they judged the offside position more systematically.

Reconsidering the scribbling stage of drawing: a new perspective on toddlers' representational processes

Although the scribbling stage of drawing has been historically regarded as meaningless and transitional, a sort of prelude to the “actual” drawing phase of childhood, recent studies have begun to re-evaluate this important moment of a child's development and find meaning in what was once considered mere motor activity and nothing more. The present study analyzes scribbling in all its subphases and discovers a clear intention behind young children's gestures. From expressing the dynamic qualities of an object and the child's relationship with it, to gradually reducing itself to a simple contour of a content no more “alive” on the paper, but only in the child's own imagination, we trace the evolution of the line as a tool that toddlers use to communicate feelings and intentions to the world that surrounds them. We will provide a selected number of graphical examples that are representative of our theory. These drawings (13 in total) were extracted from a much wider sample derived from our studies on children's graphical-pictorial abilities, conducted on children aged 0–3 years in various Italian nurseries. Our results appear to indicate that scribbling evolves through a series of stages, and that early graphical activity in children is sparked and maintained by their relationship with their caregivers and the desire to communicate with them.

Keeping It in Three Dimensions: Measuring the Development of Mental Rotation in Children with the Rotated Colour Cube Test (RCCT)

This study introduces the new Rotated Colour Cube Test (RCCT) as a measure of object identification and mental rotation using single 3D colour cube images in a matching-to-sample procedure. One hundred 7- to 11-year-old children were tested with aligned or rotated cube models, distracters and targets. While different orientations of distracters made the RCCT more difficult, different colours of distracters had the opposite effect and made the RCCT easier because colour facilitated clearer discrimination between target and distracters. Ten-year-olds performed significantly better than 7- to 8-year-olds. The RCCT significantly correlated with children's performance on the Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices Test (RCPM) presumably due to the shared multiple-choice format, but the RCCT was easier, as it did not require sequencing. Children from families with a high socio-economic status performed best on both tests, with boys outperforming girls on the more difficult RCCT test sections.

How to learn places without spatial concepts: Does the what-and-where reaction time system in children regulate learning during stimulus repetition?

We investigated the role of repetition for place learning in children although the acquisition of organizing spatial concepts is often seen as more essential. In a reaction-time accuracy task, 7- and 9-year-old children were presented with a randomized sequence of objects-in-places. In a novelty condition (NC), memory sets in different colors were presented, while in a repetition condition (RC), the identical memory set was tested several times. Shape memory deteriorated more than place memory in the NC, but also stayed superior to place memory when both improved in the RC. False alarms occurred for objects and places in the same way in 7-year-olds in the NC, but were negligible for 9-year-olds. In contrast, false alarms in the RC occurred in both age groups mainly for place memory. The Common Region Test (CRT) predicted reaction times only in the novelty condition, indicating use of spatial concepts. Importantly, reaction times for shapes were faster than for places at the beginning of the experiment but slowed down thereafter, while reaction times for places were slow at the beginning of the experiment but accelerated considerably thereafter. False alarms and regulation of reaction times indicated that repetition facilitated true abstraction of information leading to place learning without spatial concepts.

A new theory on children's drawings: Analyzing the role of emotion and movement in graphical development

The aim of this paper is to develop a new understanding of children's drawings and to provide ideas for future research in early childhood. Starting from classic theories on child graphical development, we proceed to analyze them and provide our own views on the subject. We will also recount a number of relevant empirical studies that appear to validate our theory. Our belief is that emotion and self-expression through movement play a key role in the development of child art, and that this may be already visible during the scribbling stage of drawing.