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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Structure and diversity in children's line drawings of object categories across four international contexts

Haoyu Du¹, Tarun Sepuri¹, Urvi Maheshwari¹, Rebecca Zhu², Joab Ochieng Arieda³, Bria Lorelle Long¹; ¹University of California, San Diego, ²University of California, Berkeley, ³Safe Water and AIDS Project

Presenter: Haoyu Du

Line drawings are one of our oldest cultural technologies for depicting what we know about the visual world and, in many contexts, are produced prolifically by young children throughout early and middle childhood. We examine how children's line drawings of common object categories differ across development in four international contexts (San Jose, Beijing, Kisumu, Delhi). We embedded 4,387 drawings of 12 categories produced by children ages 4--9 into the feature space of a large multimodal model and used representational similarity analysis to compare category-level structure across contexts. All four contexts shared similar category geometry, yet context permutation tests revealed reliable context-specific differences in five of six site pairs that are mostly driven by differences in drawing recognizability. Overall, cross-site similarity generally increased from younger to older children, particularly for pairs involving contexts with lower baseline recognizability. These findings suggest that children's visual conventions are broadly shared across diverse contexts, with cross-site variability largely attributable to differences in recognizability rather than site-specific representational structure.

Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations