  People can produce drawings of specific entities (e.g., Garfield), as well as
general categories (e.g., "cat"). What explains this ability to produce such
varied drawings of even highly familiar object concepts? We hypothesized that
drawing objects at different levels of abstraction depends on both sensory
information and representational goals, such that drawings intended to portray
a recently seen object preserve more detail than those intended to represent a
category. Participants drew objects cued either with a photo or a category
label. For each cue type, half the participants aimed to draw a specific
exemplar; the other half aimed to draw the category. We found that label-cued
category drawings were the most recognizable at the basic level, whereas
photo-cued exemplar drawings were the least recognizable. Together, these
findings highlight the importance of task context for explaining how people use
drawings to communicate visual concepts in different ways.
