Forget IQ tests. A new study says the real key to finding out if you have a genius on your hands is looking for freckles, goatees and other ‘exceptional items’ in their art

Next time your child proudly presents you with their scribble of a stick figure with crazy hair, it might be worth a closer look: if their drawing includes certain features, you could have a genius on your hands. According to a new study of human figures drawn by children aged seven to nine, there are 30 so-called “exceptional items” that only highly gifted children draw when depicting people.

Previous attempts to analyse children’s intelligence through their drawings have focused on their “drawing IQs”: the number of features and items drawn by a child judged against the average number drawn by children in their age group. This approach, however, is controversial. Not only do drawing IQs give no information about the particular features drawn, but there are doubts about how valid the scores are as a predictor of intelligence. The new study does not aim to measure intelligence, because, according to Sven Mathijssen – co-author of the paper Identifying Highly Gifted Children by Analysing Human Figure Drawings: An Explorative Study – “identifying giftedness goes beyond [that]”.

Exceptional items for a child to include in human figure drawings (HFD) include eye makeup, mucus, freckles, a goatee, braces, a tie, a badge, hair on the arms, gloves, a ring and a wallet chain. There are also, according to the research, specific ways of depicting a human that only highly intelligent children use, including a head from the side, hands put in the pockets, and hands behind the back.

A drawing from the study.

There is currently no precise score or set of characteristics that differentiate gifted from not-gifted children, meaning many remain unrecognised by teachers and either do not fulfil their potential or become chronic underachievers. “Most gifted programmes still rely on standardised measures, such as intelligence tests and other measures of achievement,” says Mathijssen, who works at the Center for the Study of Giftedness at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “But what is considered to be gifted goes beyond a high IQ. For example, the role of creativity – in the form of generating novel ideas, thinking flexibly and out-of-the-box – is widely considered a sign of giftedness. But these children give unusual answers to intelligence tests. Their answers are not necessarily wrong but cannot be considered correct, because they are not mentioned in the scoring manuals of the used tests.”

Because giftedness is a vague concept, Mathijssen admits that detecting highly gifted children is not an easy task, especially if a child is a so-called underachiever who achieves high on an intelligence test but relatively low in school, or scores relatively low on an intelligence test despite high potential (which can be identified through unusual scoring patterns on intelligence tests). “Our findings suggest that analysing HFD on item level may be more helpful in identifying highly gifted children than attempting to compute drawing IQs,” he says.

Mathijssen and his team found that out of 135 items drawn by the 120 children in his study – 47 of whom were highly gifted – 30 items were considered to be “exceptional” and a possible indicator for giftedness. In the drawings of the highly gifted group, each of the 30 exceptional items occurred only once or twice. Also, 20 (43%) of the highly gifted children drew one or more exceptional items. “Highly gifted children produce more novel drawings when compared to non-gifted children,” says Mathijssen.

The authors hope that analysing HFD might help identify highly gifted children who do not achieve their full potential in more standardised tests because of nerves or perfectionism. “Test anxiety is a possible cause for academic underachievement,” says Mathijssen. “But when a child is asked instead to just ‘draw a person’, that child is likely engaging in an activity that he or she has done many times and is therefore often not threatened by this task.”

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Mathijssen says the study shows the need for further research. The occurrence of certain items may be caused by the environment of the children, he says. For example, a child who draws a bearded man may know someone who has a beard. “Further research on exceptional items is needed to clarify this matter,” he says.

“It is also important to note that those exceptional items were present in only around half of the HFD of highly gifted children. So, although detection is much better when based on exceptional items (43%) than when based only on drawing IQs (6.4%), there are still many false negatives.”

Mathijssen warns parents that the exceptional items might not be found in the drawings of older children because from the age of 10, children tend to be “negatively influenced” by school setting, teachers and classmates. For that reason, the next step is to replicate the study with younger children, aged four to six, and develop criteria to identify gifted subjects much earlier.

“Parents of highly gifted children told us their children had drawn remarkably detailed HFD when they were younger,” he says. “But after they had been at school for a few years, their drawings looked exactly like the more simple drawings of their classmates.”