Drawing ability in typical and atypical development; colour cues and the effect of oblique lines.
Colour coding the key points of a drawing raises copy accuracy for children with Williams syndrome, though slanted lines remain tough.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave kids two kinds of drawing sheets. One sheet had black lines only. The other sheet used bright colours to mark each corner or turn.
Kids with Williams syndrome and typically developing kids copied simple and slanted shapes on both sheets. The researchers scored how close each copy looked to the model.
What they found
Both groups drew more accurately when colours pointed out the key spots. The gain was smaller for the Williams group.
Slanted lines stayed hard for every child, even with colour help. Colours helped, but they did not erase the slant problem.
How this fits with other research
Two years earlier Prigge et al. (2013) ran a nearly identical task. They also saw colour cues lift Williams scores up to peer level. The 2015 study repeats that boost, then adds a twist: the lift shrinks once the line tilts.
Stichter et al. (2009) worked with visual search instead of drawing. They showed that extra visual cues motion or highlights help people with ID find targets faster. The pattern matches here: add a cue, performance rises.
Vinter et al. (2018) looked at visually impaired children. Practice, not colour, drove their drawing gains. Together the papers say cues matter, but the right cue changes with the child’s need.
Why it matters
If you teach handwriting or geometry, colour the start dots, corners, or baseline edges. This cheap tweak can raise accuracy for learners with Williams syndrome or other delays. Keep the shapes straight at first; save slanted lines for later trials after the child masters the vertical and horizontal forms.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Trace the first three strokes of a letter with red, blue, and green markers, then let the child copy on the same colour dots.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have poor drawing ability. Here, we investigated whether colour could be used as a facilitation cue during a drawing task. METHOD: Participants with WS and non-verbal ability matched typically developing (TD) children were shown line figures presented on a 3 by 3 dot matrix, and asked to replicate the figures by drawing on an empty dot matrix. The dots of the matrix were either all black (control condition), or nine different coloured dots (colour condition). In a third condition, which also used coloured dots, participants were additionally asked to verbalise the colours of the dots prior to replicating the line drawings (colour-verbal condition). RESULTS: Performance was stronger in both WS and TD groups on the two coloured conditions, compared with the control condition. However, the facilitation effect of colour was significantly weaker in the WS group than in the TD group. Replication of oblique line segments was less successful than replication of non-oblique line segments for both groups; this effect was reduced by colour facilitation in the TD group only. Verbalising the colours had no additional impact on performance in either group. CONCLUSION: We suggest that colour acted as a cue to individuate the dots, thus enabling participants to better ascertain the spatial relationships between the parts of each figure, to determine the start and end points of component lines, and to determine the correspondence between the model and their replication. The reduced facilitation in the WS group is discussed in relation to the effect of oblique versus non-oblique lines, the use of atypical drawing strategies, and reduced attention to the model when drawing the replication.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2015 · doi:10.1111/jir.12161