Bourdon Cancellation Test: Foundational attention test

About the Bourdon Cancellation Test

The Bourdon Cancellation Test (1895) is the ancestor of nearly every modern attention and processing-speed test. Bourdon presented subjects with rows of mixed letters and asked them to mark every instance of a specific target letter (e.g., every "a") as quickly as possible. The score was the number of correctly cancelled targets minus errors, in a fixed time period (usually 1-5 minutes).

The test proved remarkably sensitive to fatigue, attention disorders, and brain injury. It was used extensively in industrial psychology (worker fatigue studies), in WWI Army screening for shell shock, and in clinical neurology as a quick screen for attention deficits.

Modern descendants include the d2 Test of Attention (Brickenkamp 1962, still widely used), the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (Smith 1973), and computer-administered Continuous Performance Tests. The basic paradigm - scan for targets in a noisy field, work fast, accept some errors - has not changed in 130 years.

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Take the full 50-item test

Bourdon Cancellation (1895): the prototype of all modern attention/processing-speed tests. Web-adapted version: each item shows a string of letters; pick the option that says how many times the target letter appears in the string.

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Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Bourdon, B. (1895). Observations comparatives. Revue Philosophique, 40, 153-185.

Benjamin Bourdon (1860-1943) was a French psychologist at the University of Rennes. His cancellation paradigm became the prototype for virtually every later attention test.