Healy Pictorial Completion Test: First picture-completion test

About the Healy Pictorial Completion Test

Healy's 1914 Pictorial Completion Test was one of the earliest cognitive tests to use missing-element pictures. The test consisted of 10 colored pictures, each with a small but meaningful part missing - a leg on a person, a chimney on a house, a string on a violin. The subject had to identify what was missing.

The test was widely incorporated into later batteries: it appeared as Test 8 of the Pintner-Paterson Performance Scale (1917), as one of the non-language Beta items in 1918, and in numerous individual cognitive batteries throughout the 1920s and 1930s. David Wechsler included a more demanding version of the same task as a subtest in the original Wechsler-Bellevue (1939); the WAIS-IV and WAIS-V kept the Picture Completion subtest until 2008.

Picture completion is interesting psychometrically because it measures something distinct from both abstract reasoning and verbal knowledge: it requires the subject to have an organized mental representation of common objects and then to detect deviations from that representation. It is sometimes called a measure of perceptual organization or visual gestalt ability.

The 1 subtests

Take the interactive subset

The original Healy test had 10 colored pictures. We can't fully reproduce them in HTML, but the test format is the same: describe what is missing from a complete picture. Items below are based on the descriptions in the 1914 paper and the later use of these items in the Army Beta and Pintner-Paterson scales.

No data leaves your browser.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Healy, W. (1914). The pictorial completion test. Psychological Review, 21(3), 189-203.

Public domain. William Healy was the founding director of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago (later the Institute for Juvenile Research), one of the first institutions to apply systematic cognitive testing to juvenile delinquency cases. Read it on Internet Archive: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0073920.