Relationships between procedural rigidity and interrepresentational change in children’s drawing behavior

The present experiments were aimed at testing Karmiloff- Smith’s (1992) assumption that representational flexibility in drawing behavior requires the relaxation of a sequential constraint. A total of two hundred and forty 5- to 9-year-old children produced cross-category drawings (e.g., a house with wings) in 4 conditions. The results indicated that procedural rigidity declined as representational change improved. The decline in procedural rigidity occurred before representational change attained its highest level. This decline was related to a greater ability to manage early interruptions of the procedures, not to a greater ability to modify the usual feature sequencing. It was concluded that rigidity in routine development could act as a sequential constraint on interrepresentational change.