The drawings of children with Autism, children with Down Syndrome, partially sighted and blind children and children with additional special educational needs
Systematic research with children within these populations only began relatively recently. The evidence to date has shown that the different developmental pathways that drawing can take often results in different expressions of drawing ability. For example children with Autism have been shown to draw different details to age-matched peers as well as potentially including more detail overall although less social information (Drake, Redash, Coleman, Haimson & Winner, 2010; Milbrath, 1998; Selfe, 1995). Drawings made by partially sighted and blind children have received recent interest in terms of the ability of the drawing to illustrate conceptual mapping (Sanchez, Faber & D’Angiulli, 2011). The exceptional abilities of certain children with Autism to represent reality along with children who are perceived as talented have also received research attention in recent years.
D'Angiulli, A., Miller, C., & Callaghan, K. (2008). Structural equivalences are essential, pictorial conventions are not: Evidence from haptic drawing development in children born completely blind. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2 (1), 20-33.
Drake, J. E., Redash, A., Coleman, K., Haimson, J., & Winner, E. (2010). Autistic local processing bias also found in children gifted in realistic drawing. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40, 762-773.
Holliday, E. L., Harrison, L. J., & McLeod, S. (2009). Listening to children with communication impairment talking through their drawings. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 7 (3), 244-263.
Jolley, R. P., O'Kelly, R., Barlow, C. M., & Jarrold, C. (2013). Expressive drawing ability in children with autism. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 31 (1), 143-149.
Laws, G. & Lawrence, L. (2001). Spatial relations in the drawings of children with Down’s Syndrome and its relationship to language and motor development: A preliminary investigation. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 453-473.
Lee, A. & Hobson, P.(2006). Drawing self and others: How do children with autism differ from those with learning difficulties? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24 (3), 547-565.
Milbrath, C. (1998). Patterns of artistic development in children: Comparative studies of talent. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Regev, D., & Guttmann, J. (2005). The psychological benefits of artwork: The case of children with learning disorders. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 32(4), 302-312.
Sanchez, M. T., Faber, P. & D’Angiulli, A. (2011). The depiction of wheels by blind children: Preliminary studies on pictorial metaphors, language and embodied imagery. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 31, 113-128.
Selfe, L. (1977). Nadia: A case of extraordinary drawing ability in an autistic child. London: Academic Press.
Selfe, L. (1995). Nadia reconsidered. In C. Golomb (Ed.). The development of artistically gifted child artists: selected case studies, pp. 197-237. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Vinter, A., Fernandes, V., Orlandi, O. & Morgan, P. (2012). Exploratory procedures of tactile images in visually impaired and blindfolded sighted children: How they relate to their consequent performance in drawing. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 33 (6), 1819-1831.
Wang, L. C., Yang, H. M., Tasi, H. J., & Chan, S. Y. (2013). Learner-generated drawing for phonological and orthographic dyslexic readers. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 34 (1), 228-233.
Wiltshire, S. (1991). Floating cities: Venice, Amsterdam, Leningrad and Moscow. London: Michel Joseph.