From the moment babies can hold the pencil, their scribbling on a piece of paper is a source of endless hours of fun for them. But now researchers from King’s College London in the UK, believe that drawing skills of children indicate their future intelligence.
According to the King’s College researchers, there’s a link between a child’s drawing and their later intelligence. They researched on 7,752 pairs of identical and non-identical twins. The scientists asked the children at age four to draw a picture of a child, and the researchers then scored each figure between 0 and 12, depending on how anatomically correct they were. The children also had their intelligence measured both at ages four and 14.
According to researchers, the way a child draws at four years old is an indicator of how intelligent they’ll be at age 14. Researchers found that higher scores on the Draw-a-Child test were moderately linked to high intelligence scores at both ages. Besides, researchers also found that identical twins had more similar drawing skills at age four than non-identical twins. Researchers discovered, identical twins share all their genes, whereas non-identical twins share about 50 percent.
Rosalind Arden, the lead researcher of the study, said in a press release, “There are countless factors, both genetic and environmental, which affect intelligence in later life. The Draw-a-Child test was devised in the 1920s to assess children’s intelligence, so the fact that the test correlated with intelligence at age four was expected. What surprised us was that it correlated with intelligence a decade later.”
There is still a lot of research to be done on how genes affect our abilities, but this is interesting early research into the link between drawing and intelligence. The researchers have published their study in the journal, Psychological Science.
Source: King’s College London
Thanks To: Science Daily
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