Overview
- The experiment enlisted 18 children ages 4–6 and 34 adults ages 18–25 to make floor-based pour paintings in a Pollock style.
- Fractal and lacunarity analyses showed adults produced denser paint fields with wider, more varied trajectories, while children’s works had smaller fine-scale patterns, more gaps, and simpler paths.
- Children’s paintings matched Pollock’s measured characteristics more closely than adults’ did, though the proposed role of body balance was not directly measured.
- Viewers judged paintings with more open space and less complex fractal structure as more pleasant, a profile common in the children’s outputs.
- Comparative checks placed Max Ernst’s pendulum work within the children’s distribution and Pollock’s Number 14 near it, and the authors plan motion-sensor follow-ups and broader lacunarity surveys.