European Journal of Psychology of Education 1995. Vol. X. nn 3.303-313 © 1995. I.S.PA. Judgement and Production of Drawings by 3- to IO-year-olds: Comparison of Declarative and Procedural Drawing Knowledge Michel Fayol Pierre Barrouillet Chantal Chevrot University of Bourgogne, Dijon, France In this experiment, 80 children between the ages of three and ten produced and judged drawings of a person and a house. Two alternative hypotheses were tested. Under the first hypothesis, young children have internal models of persons and objects which are comparable to those of adults, but they have problems implementing their knowledge and planning and managing the graphic activity. If this hypothesis is true, we should obtain an interaction between age and type of task (production vs. judgement). Under the second hypothesis, children's drawings are a direct reflection of their internal models of the items drawn. This hypothesis predicted a significant positive corre- lation between performance on production andjudgement. In the judgement task, the subjects were presented with pairs of drawings and asked to indicate the more elaborate drawing. For the house and the man drawing, children by the age of three were able to correctly determine the most elaborated of the two presented drawings. A strong interaction was obtained between age and type of task (pro- duction or judgement), due to the fact that the difference between pro- duction performance andjudgement performance decreases with age. The discussion suggests a limited cognitive capacity hypothesis to account for the results, and proposes some possibilities for future stu- dies. A meaningful drawing of a scene or object can be considered as an external coding through an arrangement of graphic forms of an internal representation (i.e., "mental model"). There are two problems inherent in this definition of drawings, especially from a developmen- tal perspective. The first problem pertains to the development of internal representations, pro- totypes, and schernas (Cordier, Denhiere, George, Crepault, Hoc, & Richard, 1990). We will not deal with this problem here. We will postulate - being nonetheless fully aware of the high- ly debatable nature of this hypothesis (see Hunt & Agnoli, 1991 for a recent approach to this