Drawings or paintings can reveal the high intellectual potential of children. According to this Dutch study, all you need to do is take a look at their artwork and see if these details appear.
Parents are always proud to know that their child is gifted: certainly, they often have to help them adapt to their environment, but they are also reassured about the abilities they can develop, particularly at school. To find out if a child is precocious, gifted or has high intellectual potential (HPI), IQ tests are generally recommended. But according to a Dutch study, it would be enough to ask children to make a pretty drawing or a beautiful painting, and then observe the result. Scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands separated 120 children aged 7 to 9 into two groups, including one with 47 children with an IQ of over 130, and asked them to draw a person in ten minutes. Result: the drawings of the gifted children were very particular compared to those of the other children.
Indeed, gifted children think differently, and see things, details, that do not seem to be as important to other children their age. In total, all the children added some details to their drawings such as earrings or nose piercings, but thirty accessories were only found in the group of small HPI artists. According to the study authors, these unusual details could therefore be typical of HPI children.
So, what exactly did they draw? The drawn characters had their heads positioned to the side, their hands in their pockets or behind their backs, nipples, a small beard, hair on their arms or even freckles. Other children added accessories to the shoes like laces, spurs on cowboy boots, gloves, wings, suspenders, a tie, a ring, a badge. There are also very colorful drawings, and some children have added other details: eye makeup, a frame around the face, a wallet chain, genitals, a tail, nails, feet with toes, other characters, but also an animal or a fly.
As you can see, it’s all in the details. But that doesn’t mean that the children in the other group don’t have imagination: they too added their little detailed touch: a nose piercing, a knee, a zipper on the shoes and very straight lines. According to the researchers, these details should attract attention during examinations to determine whether a child is gifted, but this study also deserves to be supported by other research, in particular on the time taken to create the silhouette which does not was not taken into account in this study.