Your Drawing Skills as a Kid Indicated How Smart You Would be as an Adult

Remember all those drawings you did of the house on the hill with the chimney and swirly smoke? You probably brushed them off as nothing, because you were just a kid and let's be honest — you never could master the complexities of windows. But guess what? If that house looked anywhere near what a house actually looks like, it was a sign that you were going to be an intelligent adult. According to a study, kids who draw well end up being slightly more intelligent than kids who don't draw well.

Researchers at King's College London — led by Dr. Rosalind Arden — asked 7,700 pairs of 4-year-old identical and fraternal twins to draw pictures of a baby. The reason they used babies was because it's something that even the youngest among us understands. "Drawing is an ancient behaviour, dating back beyond 15,000 years ago," Arden explained to BBC News. "Through drawing, we are attempting to show someone else what's in our mind. This capacity to reproduce figures is a uniquely human ability and a sign of cognitive ability, in a similar way to writing, which transformed the human species' ability to store information, and build a civilisation."

Once each drawing was completed, it was then given a score based on how accurate the portrayal was. For example, if the baby had two arms, two legs, but no head, it would likely get a low score. If the child included all the parts, it would get a high score. Each child taking the drawing test was also given verbal and nonverbal tests for intelligence. When the twins reached aged 14, they were all given the intelligence tests again.

Arden and her team found that found that higher scores on the drawing test were associated with higher scores on the intelligence tests. This wasn't a surprise to Arden, and she insisted this didn't mean if a kid can't draw a house on a hill he's screwed. "The correlation is moderate, so our findings are interesting, but it does not mean that parents should worry if their child draws badly," Arden explained to Science Daily. "Drawing ability does not determine intelligence, there are countless factors, both genetic and environmental, which affect intelligence in later life."

Arden brought up genetic factors for a reason. While the correlations between drawings and intelligence tests were moderate, they were higher for the pairs of identical twins than the fraternal twins. This suggests what other studies have shown: that genes have a lot of influence on our creative and cognitive abilities. Arden is going to continue her research, but until she comes up with more results, we're going to add some birds to our house drawing. Let's see her figure that out.

[Image via Flickr - by_Anita]