Are Smart Kids Better at Drawing?

New York Magazine:

The messy, free-form way that preschool kids draw is adorable. (Sure, kid, people totally have arms and legs growing out of their heads. Looks great.) But can these anatomically questionable pictures tell us anything else about the children who drew them? One team of U.K. psychologists sought to answer that, and in a new paper, they argue that the way a child draws at age 4 can predict intelligence at age 14.

The research will appear in an upcoming paper in Psychological Science, and the press release summarizes the findings like so:

At the age of 4, children were asked by their parents to complete a ‘Draw-a-Child’ test, i.e. draw a picture of a child. Each figure was scored between 0 and 12 depending on the presence and correct quantity of features such as head, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, body, arms etc. For example, a drawing with two legs, two arms, a body and head, but no facial features, would score 4. The children were also given verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests at ages 4 and 14.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine