About the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test
Lauretta Bender (1897-1987) was Senior Psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York and one of the most influential American child psychiatrists of the 20th century. In 1938 she published A Visual Motor Gestalt Test and Its Clinical Use, introducing a brief clinical instrument based on the geometric figures studied by gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer.
The test is administered very simply: the examiner shows the subject nine printed cards, one at a time, each showing a geometric figure (intersecting lines, a row of dots, a wavy line, etc.). The subject copies each figure onto a blank sheet of paper. The whole administration takes about 10 minutes. Scoring assesses distortions, rotations, perseverations, fragmentation, and other errors that may indicate organic brain dysfunction, developmental immaturity, or specific neurocognitive conditions.
The Bender Gestalt became extraordinarily popular in clinical practice from the 1940s through the 1970s. It was used in neurological screening, intellectual disability assessment, learning disability identification, school readiness evaluation, and many other contexts. Estimates of its peak use suggest the Bender was one of the most-administered psychological tests in clinical practice during the postwar decades. The 2003 Bender-Gestalt II revision (Pearson) is still in active clinical use.
The 1 subtests
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All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
The Bender Gestalt and Bender-2 (2003) remain under PsychCorp (now Pearson) copyright. We document the test's history and significance.
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