At around age four, most children begin drawing a sun with a smiling face and rays shooting from its edges regardless of what suns look like in their own sky, a convention documented across cultures on six continents and one that developmental psychologists trace to a shift from perceptual drawing t

The rayed, smiling sun that four-year-olds draw across every continent isn't a copy of the sky — it's one of childhood's earliest and most universal symbols, marking the shift from drawing what the eye sees to drawing what the mind knows. The post At around a…