What Kids’ Drawings Say About Their Future Thinking Skills

NPR:

At age 4, many young children are just beginning to explore their artistic style.

The kid I used to babysit in high school preferred self-portraits, undoubtedly inspired by the later works of Joan Miro. My cousin, a prolific young artist, worked almost exclusively on still lifes of 18-wheelers.

These early works may be good for more than decorating your refrigerator and cubicle, researchers say. There appears to be an association, though a modest one, between how a child draws at 4 and her thinking skills at 14, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science.

The findings don’t mean parents should worry if their little ones aren’t producing masterpieces early on. But the study suggests that intellectual and artistic skills may be related to each other in a way that reveals something about the influence of our genes.

Researchers from King’s College London enlisted 7,700 pairs of 4-year-old identical and fraternal twins in England to draw pictures of a child. The researchers scored each drawing on a scale of 0 to 12, based on how many body parts were included. All of the kids also took verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests at 4 and 14.

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