The development of graphic activity in children: neuro-motor-cognitive integration

Graphic activity is a complex competence in which different abilities of the individual come together: movement, coordination, posture, motor programming, sight, perception of reality, representational capacity and knowledge. Coordination between these various abilities first requires adequate development of the central and peripheral nervous system, so that the activity can be developed and carried out appropriately in the individual stages of the child's development. During the first year of life, the child goes through a complex process of differentiation from the grasping reflex to the actual prehensile capacity. The reflex is a response that the organism always gives involuntarily, and sometimes unconsciously, to stimuli from its surroundings and from within itself. Classic examples of reflex responses are the patellar reflex (when the patellar ligament or tendon is struck with the hammer), coughing and moving away from a very hot object. In order to evolve (differentiate) the reflex into a voluntary movement, such as grasping an object, there is, in the first 16 weeks of life, the development of the spinal cord and the medulla. The development of the bulbar reticular formation is indispensable, as it enables inhibitory control of voluntary movement and myotonic postural control. Between 16 weeks and 6 months, there also follows the development of the pontine reticular formation, which allows facilitative control over voluntary movement. And finally, between 6 months and one year of age there is the development of the midbrain, which is a structure that is also fundamental in motor programming. As a result, in the first 3-4 months of life the hands move asymmetrically, whereas from the fourth month onwards the hands begin to move more symmetrically. For example, the child takes both hands to the bottle. From the sixth month onwards, the increased control of upper limb movements, thanks to the completion of the development of the bulbar-pontine reticular formation, allows for more independent movement..

Il Sistema Nervoso Centrale

The development of the pons and midbrain (especially also of the lamina quadrigemina) is indispensable for the completion of the development of the visual system, which subsequently enables hand-eye coordination in relation to the object the child wants to pick up. Therefore, from 8 months onwards, voluntary motor control is possible and allows them to pick up an object, and around one year of age they are also able to program the direction of movement. This neuro-muscular development is fundamental to being able to grasp the pencil to try scribbling back and forth between 12 and 18 months of age. Between one and five years of age there is the development of the cerebral cortex where the child brings to a conscious level what is detected by receptors about the state of the body. The following increased self-awareness leads to better and better discrimination of incoming neurological information. This leads to an increase in the organisation of incoming proprioceptive and visual (perception) information, allowing new motor patterns to be developed, which in turn allow for greater control of neuro-motor output. As a result, the child develops greater control over what he is actually drawing. So at the age of two the circular doodle appears, while at three he is even able to copy a drawing and draw freely. At the age of 4 he starts to draw the human figure with the main elements (head, eyes, mouth, legs and arms).

During these years, there is also a significant development of cognitive skills. In the so-called preoperational stage, as Piaget defined it, in which the child has developed the capacity for mental representation of objects. This ability determines one of the characteristics of this stage: the acquisition of the visual sign, in which the child represents reality through drawing. He can therefore imagine reality and try to reproduce it with a pencil on a sheet of paper. The reproduction of the human figure starts with the child's mental representation of it. This specific representational capacity arises from the integration between how the child sees himself and others and the proprioceptive and sensitive information detected in his own body. The high number of proprioceptive (proprioceptors) and sensory receptors in certain body areas (e.g. fingers or lips) causes a distorted mental representation of one's own body, which is subsequently corrected by visual information. So the "distorted" drawing at 3-4 years of age with a much larger head and of which even small details such as the eyes and mouth are drawn, rather than the addition of the navel at 4 years of age in the drawing of the abdomen, for example, are a sign of an ongoing elaboration-integration between the body parts with greater sensory and proprioceptive development and the incoming visual information. At the age of six, this process is more complete and therefore the neck and hands appear in the drawing of the human figure and the body becomes more proportionate.

Jean Piaget

Also important for graphic development is the "emotional" context in which the child lives, because as Piaget and Inhelder documented in 1967, the child, from this point of view, can only draw what it knows and not what it sees. A child who is comfortable in his environment tends to draw the figure in the centre of the paper, use colour and enrich the drawing with his father's beard (if he has one) or, for example, his mother's shoes with heels. The emotional state of the child can also lead to representations of home and, for example, a tree in the garden with a swing. Graphic competence is therefore an expression of the development of various skills and the interaction between them.