How a child at age 4 draws a picture of a child, is an indicator of intelligence at age 14 according to findings from a study undertaken by The Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, and published in Psychological Science.

“In 1926, a young woman struggled to come up with a reliable way to measure the intelligence of young children. Florence Goodenough (1886-1959) conceived the idea of asking the children to draw a human figure. Her ability test was remarkable … and crucially, it worked”

Using the Draw-A-Person test, which has been around for almost 90 years, researchers reported their findings from “the first genetically informative study of individual differences in children’s figure drawings and their relation to intelligence measured a decade later.”

After studying over 15 000 children, (approximately 50% of them twins), the researchers found a “moderate correlation” between how children score on the test at age 4 and their intelligence levels at age 14 and indicatons of a genetic component behind intelligence.