Extreme Drawing Realism in Childhood. Issue 4 (2nd October 2018) - Drake, Jennifer E.
Abstract : Precocious realists are children who are able to create realistic drawings that resemble those of adult artists. Is this talent a splinter skill, or is it associated with other kinds of high ability? We administered IQ and visual–spatial tasks to 12 precocious realists and compared their performance to a control group of children matched on age, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) and asked their parents to complete questionnaires assessing their children's personality traits. Precocious realism proved unrelated to either superior verbal or nonverbal IQs and proved related only to two of the five visual–spatial tasks we administered. Precocious realists scored higher on the trait of openness to experience and their parents described them as having extreme rage to master. Contrary to some previous claims, they did not show any elevated autistic-like traits. We conclude by making education recommendations for artistically gifted children.