La description de gravures chez des enfants d’âge scolaire : quoi de neuf un siècle après Binet ?

RésuméL’objectif de cet article est d’analyser, chez des enfants de 6 à 11 ans, l’évolution des réponses à la très ancienne épreuve de description de gravures de Binet (1908). L’expérience est située dans le cadre actuel de la cognition sociale et de la construction de modèles de situation élaborés par les enfants. Les corpus montrent l’extraordinaire intuition de Binet sur l’implication des capacités sociales et émotionnelles et leur développement avec l’âge. Ce qui est nouveau concerne l’identification de préférences thématiques dans les réponses d’une partie des enfants ayant atteint un certain niveau d’interprétation. Leurs réponses se centrent soit exclusivement sur des interprétations socio-émotionnelles soit intègrent à la fois les aspects socio-émotionnels et environnementaux. La mise en perspective de cette épreuve, assortie de sa nouvelle cotation, avec d’autres épreuves d’intelligence et de cognition sociale permettrait de cerner davantage sa spécificité et la contribution qu’elle pourrait apporter au bilan psychologique.

A century ago, Binet proposed an engraving description task (1908) to which he granted exceptional value. The task consists of showing children three engravings of scenes depicting one or two characters, and asking them to say what the scenes represent. Binet scored the children's responses in terms of three modes: enumeration, description, and interpretation, corresponding respectively to three ages: 3, 7, and 12 years. The aim of the present article was to analyze the developmental course of schoolchildren's responses on this task (70 children ages 6 to 11). The experiment was conducted in the theoretical and empirical framework of social cognition and situation-model building during task execution. The verbalization corpus was analyzed with respect to 14 themes, including surrounding objects, spatial relations, features of the characters’ appearance, postures and gestures, physical properties of objects, aspects of the environment, location of the scene, family ties, object possession, socio-cultural references, physical or physiological states, emotions, and goal-oriented actions. The results pointed out the extraordinary intuition of Binet, an entire century ago, notably regarding the involvement of social and emotional abilities in this task. The observed developmental changes were great. As the children grew older, their responses included more and more socio-cultural references, emotions, physiological states of characters, actions, and variables describing the physical environment. However, what is new here but requires confirmatory studies concerns the identification of thematic preferences by some of the older children who were able to better grasp the scene and achieve a certain level of interpretation. The children's responses focus on socio-emotional interpretations or simultaneously integrate the socio-emotional and environmental dimensions. The conclusion discusses future extensions of this study to older ages, the potential contribution of eye-movement tracking, and comparisons of this task with other intelligence and social cognition tests.