Tadpole person

A children's drawing of a human figure represented a roughly hexagonal head with a smiley face, lacking a torso, with legs (and often arms) sprouting from its head. The figure also has two antennae sprouting from the top. The drawing is made on paper in simplistic lines with blue crayon.
An example of a tadpole person in a drawing by a child aged 4½.

A tadpole person[1][2][3] or headfooter[4][5] is a simplistic representation of a human being as a figure without a torso, with arms and legs attached to the head. Tadpole people appear in young children's drawings before they learn to draw torsos and move on to more realistic depictions such as stick figures.

Preschoolers who draw tadpole people will generally not draw torsos, even when instructed to include features that are part of the torso, such as a belly button. Instead, they tend to draw the feature onto the tadpole person without modifying the figure.[6][7]

  1. ^ Freeman, N.H. (3 April 1975). "Do children draw men with arms coming out of the head?". Nature. 254 (5499): 416–417. Bibcode:1975Natur.254..416F. doi:10.1038/254416a0. S2CID 4269922. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
  2. ^ Bassett, Elizabeth M. (1977). "Chapter 3: Production Strategies in the Child's Drawing of the Human Figure: Towards an Argument for a Model of Syncretic Perception". In Butterworth, George (ed.). The Child's Representation of the World. Plenum Press. pp. 49–59. ISBN 0306310252.
  3. ^ Spensley, Fiona; Taylor, Josie (1999). "The Development of Cognitive Flexibility: Evidence from Children's Drawings". Human Development. 42 (6): 300–324. doi:10.1159/000022639. JSTOR 26763422. S2CID 29015414. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
  4. ^ ter Laak, J.; de Goede, M.; Aleva, A.; van Rijswijk, P. (2005). "The Draw-A-Person Test: An Indicator of Children's Cognitive and Socioemotional Adaptation?". The Journal of Genetic Psychology. 166 (1): 77–93. doi:10.3200/GNTP.166.1.77-93. hdl:1874/27790. PMID 15782679. S2CID 12572911. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
  5. ^ Seidel, Christa (November 3–7, 2010). Model for Interpreting Drawings and its Application in the Hospital School (PDF). 7th Hope Congress. Munich.
  6. ^ Coté, Carol A.; Golbeck, Susan (2007-08-13). "Pre-schoolers' feature placement on own and others' person drawings". International Journal of Early Years Education. 15 (3): 231–243. doi:10.1080/09669760701516868. S2CID 143866588. Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  7. ^ Boyatzis, C.J.; Michaelson, P.; Lyle, E. (1995). "Symbolic immunity and flexibility in preschoolers' human figure drawings". The Journal of Genetic Psychology. 156 (3): 293–302. doi:10.1080/00221325.1995.9914824. PMID 7595423. Retrieved 2023-03-20.