2-5: Willats – Changes in Representational Systems

"All the evidence I have given for this account of the developmental changes in children's drawings has been derived from drawings produced by American and English children. To what extent can this account be used to describe children's drawings from other cultures? This question is difficult to answer because of the paucity of evidence bearing on the subject. [...]" (Willats, 1997, p. 315)

"It seems reasonable to conclude that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the classification schemes that I have proposed can be applied to children's drawings in all cultures, not just Western cultures. Moreover, in cultures where there is any evidence of a developmental sequence, drawings in the different classes appear in very much the same sequence. That is not to say that there are not considerable differences in drawings from different cultures, but these differences appear to be relatively superficial. The difference between perspective and inverted perspective, for example, is relatively superficial compared with the difference between both these systems and vertical oblique projection: in both these systems the orthogonals are represented by oblique lines and the shapes of the side and top faces of objects are distorted, whereas in vertical oblique projection the orthogonals are represented by vertical lines and the top face is represented as a true shape. Progression to the higher classes of systems in which objects are shown from a general direction of view is evidently very dependent on schooling and the presence of exemplars in the pictorial environment." (Willats, 1997, p. 315)