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Public Domain · 1895

Binet-Henri Mental Tests: The conceptual blueprint for modern IQ testing

The proto-Binet test that came TEN YEARS before the famous 1905 Binet-Simon scale. Binet and Henri proposed measuring 10 mental faculties (memory, attention, comprehension, suggestibility, judgment, imagination, etc.) rather than the sensory-motor measures Galton and Cattell were using. This conceptual shift made modern intelligence testing possible.

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About the Binet-Henri Mental Tests

In 1895 Binet and Henri published "La psychologie individuelle" in L'Année Psychologique, arguing that the existing Galtonian approach (measuring reaction times, sensory discrimination, head size) had failed to capture meaningful individual differences in mental ability. They proposed testing 10 higher mental functions: memory, mental imagery, attention, comprehension, suggestibility, aesthetic appreciation, moral sentiment, muscular force and will-power, motor skill and judgment of visual space.

This was a radical shift. Cattell and others had been measuring elementary processes (how fast you can react to a sound, how finely you can discriminate weights), assuming intelligence was built bottom-up from sensory acuity. Binet argued intelligence was top-down: it was about judgment, comprehension, and reasoning, and you had to measure those things directly.

The 1895 paper laid the conceptual groundwork; over the next 10 years Binet refined his methods, eventually producing the 1905 Binet-Simon Scale - the first practical intelligence test and the direct ancestor of every modern IQ test. The 1895 paper is rarely cited today but is arguably the single most important document in the history of mental testing.

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Binet-Henri 1895 framework: 10 mental faculties Binet proposed measuring 10 years before his famous 1905 scale. Below are items spanning all 10 faculties: memory, mental imagery, attention, comprehension, suggestibility, aesthetic appreciation, moral sentiment, will-power, motor skill, judgment of space.

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About these items: These Binet-Henri Mental Tests items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1895 test, NOT verbatim copies of the historical items. Where the original is a 1-on-1 oral or physical-apparatus test (e.g., examiner shows a card, child draws a shape), we have adapted the format to self-administered multiple choice.

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Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Binet, A., & Henri, V. (1895). La psychologie individuelle. L'Année Psychologique, 2, 411-465.

Alfred Binet (1857-1911) was director of the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne; Victor Henri (1872-1940) was his student and collaborator. Their 1895 paper effectively founded the modern field of cognitive testing.

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