Sketch Mental Reinstatement of Context: A Comparison of Autistic and Typically Able Children’s Drawings

Sketch Mental Reinstatement of Context: A Comparison of Autistic and Typically Able Children’s Drawings

Mehar-Un-Nissa Masood

2013

The increasing number of children coming into contact with the criminal justice system is prompting further research into interviewing children. There is a lack of research in the area of children with developmental disorders such as autism (Mcrory, Henry & Happe, 2007). As sketching is one of the domains in which children develop favourably in comparison to their age matched peers it could be utilised in order to gain the most information. Sketch MRC has been used on typically developing individuals and has been very beneficial for a variety of reasons such as; gives structure to narrative, lessens cognitive demand of interviewer and also lessens social demand of interview. This study aims to see whether content and style of the drawings of typically developing and autistic group are similar. Also correlating data in the sketch to data from the interview recall would give insight into how the act of drawing may be beneficial. A group of 30 children who were either typically developing or autistic were split into 3 groups depending on the results of BPVS 3 and RPM. All children watched a film stimulus and were then asked to recall as much information as possible in a sketch MRC condition. The drawings were then analysed. Autistic children’s sketches when compared with mental ability matched children showed similarities in; number of salient items, number of items drawn, representational detail, detail in human figure drawings, number of correct, incorrect and confabulation as well as accuracy. A regression model indicated correct number of items recalled in verbal transcript significantly predicted the correct number of items in the sketch. By presenting a significant relationship between number of correct items sketched and recalled it can be said the act of drawing is useful in the sketch MRC condition. This indicates that the sketch MRC condition is just as useful for the autistic individuals as it is for the TD individuals.

A between subject’s experimental design was employed with two independent variables: Group, with two levels: (i) autistic, (ii) typically developed, and Mental ability: low, intermediate, and high. The dependent variable was the drawings which were produced during the interview and were coded using a top down coding scheme measuring the number of correct, incorrect, confabulated items of recall and accuracy. Content including representational detail of human figure drawing and what the individual focuses whether it is on people or the environment. Qualitative analysis attempts to uncover a range of issues such as; is structure used in the sketch, whether the sketches depict movement or a still image, the detail with which the items are drawn, and if the sketch demand interaction.

Materials
Film stimulus – Each child individually viewed a non-violent crime film exactly one minute in duration. The stimulus film was one which had been previously used in police training sessions. Keeping in mind ethical guidelines the clip shown had no abuse or violence. The film depicted a busy road with a roundabout, two people walk from around the corner and into a shop. Moments later the two individuals run out of the shop with another individual chasing after them. The clip then ends.
The British Picture Vocabulary Scale: Third Edition (BPVS3) is used in order to act as a distracter task but also determine the child’s mental ability. The BPVS3 plays an important role in assessing a child’s receptive vocabulary, from 3 years up to 16 years of age.
Ravens Progressive Matrices (RPM) is also required not only to act as a distracter task but also determine the child’s mental ability. The RPM is a nonverbal group test ranging from 5 year olds to the elderly. It consists of 60 multiple choice questions listed in order of difficulty.
iPad was used to show children the film stimulus with approximately a 8-inch screen. The child was able to hold the iPad themselves to watch the film stimulus.
Procedure
Each child was individually taken from their class and shown the film stimulus by an assistant teacher. The researcher did not show the clip to the child, as the child was led to believe that the researcher has never seen the clip before. This was done to make sure the child recalled as much information as possible, and did not presume the researcher already knew it all. Once they had watched the entire film stimulus, the child was brought into a different room by the researcher.
The researcher then began to carry out the BPVS3. When this was completed the child was asked to work through the RPM and complete the 60 questions. This allowed the child and researcher to build a rapport and also acted as a distracter task from the film stimulus.
The researcher then explained to the child that for the next part of the experiment the child’s voice would be recorded. The child was asked for their permission and if the child agreed the researcher explained that recording was about to begin. The child was then asked to recall as much information about the video clip as possible, and asked to draw what they remember. Once they had began drawing they were then asked about their drawing with questions such as ‘what is it that you are drawing there?’ They were given as much time as required to complete the drawing.
Once the drawing was completed, the child was asked to tell the researcher about everything they remembered, and told they were free to use the drawing to help them in the explanation. After the child had told the researcher about everything they remembered in a free recall phase, the child was questioned on what they remembered. For example, if the child said there were two people, the researcher would try and gain some in depth information about these people. The child was then thanked for taking part in the experiment and told that their parent or guardian will be given a gift voucher for them to spend.
Scoring
The drawings produced by autistic and typically developed children were coded alongside the transcripts from the interview to aid the understanding of the drawings. A similar approach was successfully adopted in Campbell, Sicovdal, Mupambireyi and Greyson (2010) as it minimised the analysts’ subjective interpretation of the drawings. However, the transcripts themselves were not analysed as they form the dataset of another PhD project. The rationale for using the transcripts is to aid understanding of the drawing is offered by
Each drawing was analysed using a three-step framework (see Fig.1) which started by analysing to what extent sketches represented the event that was witnessed. This was done to determine whether the sketch was successful in depicting the TBR event. The second step involved further analysing the items in the drawing, focusing on correctness. The final step examined representational detail and differences in what groups focussed upon, as well as qualitative analysis.
The first step of analysis shed light on the overarching aim of the study and to gain an idea about how the sketches depicted an illustration of the film stimulus. A gross measure of the sketches was taken, which took into consideration the total number of attributes, to give an understanding of how detailed these sketches were. To determine whether the sketches successfully depicted what was shown in the film stimulus, the five most salient aspects of the TBR event were defined as follows: a road, cars, two individuals, shop, and another individual (the victim). One mark was awarded for each aspect depicted in the sketch, giving a possible total completeness score of 5.
The following step in analysis was to bring to attention correctness scores. Every item drawn in the sketch was determined as correct, incorrect (sketching one person going into the shop instead of two) or a confabulation (sketching a detail that was not present in the film stimulus). Accuracy was calculated by dividing total number of correct items sketched by total number of items. The items were then divided into three groups whether they illustrated people or environment. Using the PhD projects data a correlation is carried out to see whether total number of items and total number of correct items depicted in the sketch correlates with total number of items and total number of correct items recalled in the transcript. This would help understand how useful the act of sketching rather than focusing on the sketches content.
As it was of essence to capture representational details human figure drawings were recognised on their complexity according to Cox and Parkins (1986) classification system of human figure drawings. In this stage data will be analysed qualitatively in order to gain a better understanding of the sketches.


Figure 1. Concepts guiding analysis of drawings.

Lancaster University

Masood2013

Nicola Cook

English

Data

LA1 4YF

Dr Tom Ormerod

MSc

Autism

Participants
Autistic group – Fifteen children, between 5-16 years, of mixed genders, with autism were recruited from special schools in England. They had been given a formal diagnosis of autism by an appropriately qualified clinician according to current diagnostic criteria; DSM-IV (APA, 1994) and ICD-10 (WHO, 1993).
Typically Developing (TD) Group – Fifteen typically developing children, between 5-16 years, of mixed genders, were recruited from a state primary school in England. None of the children were known to have any symptoms associated with autism or Aspergers.
To ensure the TD group and autistic group were comparable in terms of their drawing skill, both groups were matched according to their performances on Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) (Raven, Court & Raven, 1983) and the British Vocabulary Scale: Third edition (BPVS 3) (Dunn, Dunn, Whetton & Burley, 1997). Descriptive information about participants is given in Table 1. An independent t-test confirmed that autistic and typically developing groups did not differ significantly on RCPM raw scores t(28) = -0.61, p = 0.54. Submitting the BPVS 3 raw score to independent t-test failed to reveal a significant effect of group (t(28) = 0.26, p = 0.78). Thus, the autistic and typically developing groups had overlapping ranges in both the RCPM and BPVS 3.
Each autistic child was matched with a typically developing child that had the closest score in both the BPVS 3 and RCPM. For example, an autistic child who had scored 87 and 23 on the BPVS 3 and the RCPM respectively was matched with a typically developing TD child who scored 87 and 22 respectively. Participants were then assigned to one of three groups, depending on how they performed in the tests. Those who scored lowest were assigned to the low mental ability group, those that scored highest were assigned to the high mental ability group, and those whose which scored in the middle were assigned to the intermediate mental ability group. ANOVA confirmed a significant difference between the three groups in both the BPVS 3 F(2, 27) = 33.90, p< 0.01) and the RCPM F(2, 27) = 6.59, p< 0.05 thereby justifying splitting the groups in such a manner.
All participants were naive to the experimental aims and hypotheses. Written consent was obtained from parents. Gift vouchers were given to parents as a reward on their child’s completion of the experiment.

Table 1 Means, standard deviations (SDs), and ranges for Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) score, and the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS 3) score for the Autistic and Typically Developing (TD) groups
Group N Mean Standard Deviation Range
RCPM
Autistic 15 22.00 7.55 7.00-34.00
Typically Developed 15 23.6 7.28 7.00-34.00
BPVS3
Autistic 15 118.73 22.95 87.00-159.00
Typically Developed 15 116.33 27.35 74.00-159.00

ANOVA,