The development of drawing in children with congenital focal brain injury: evidence for limited functional recovery. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Children with pre- or perinatal injury to right hemisphere (RH) brain regions show impairment of spatial integrative functions similar to that observed among adults with comparable injury. Unlike adults, children show considerable improvement with development on a range of spatial construction tasks which require spatial integration. Such gains could reflect true recovery of spatial integrative abilities. Alternatively, the improvement could be more limited in scope, reflecting the development of compensatory strategies which are task specific and allow the children to circumvent, rather than overcome, their primary spatial disorders. The studies presented here examined this distinction within the context of drawing tasks in which the child was first asked to draw a house and then an impossible house. The impossible house task was designed to examine the extent to which children rely on graphic formulas in generating organized drawings. The results showed that while all of the children with RH injury make considerable progress in free drawing into the school age period, they are very reliant on the use of graphic formulas. When given a task which requires them to alter their drawings, they did not change the spatial configuration of the depicted object. Rather they found alternate ways to render the object 'impossible'.

publication date

  • March 1, 1997

Research

keywords

  • Cerebral Cortex
  • Cerebrovascular Disorders
  • Child Development
  • Functional Laterality
  • Perceptual Disorders
  • Psychomotor Disorders
  • Space Perception

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 0031040503

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1016/s0028-3932(96)00088-7

PubMed ID

  • 9051678

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 35

issue

  • 3