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Public Domain · 1914

Healy Pictorial Completion Test: First picture-completion test

An early non-verbal test using pictures with missing parts. The subject identifies (or draws in) what is missing. Developed by William Healy at the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago. The picture-completion format survives essentially unchanged in modern Wechsler tests.

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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.

About this interactive version: The Healy Pictorial Completion Test requires the original 10 colored pictures. The exact pictures used in the 1914 article are difficult to reproduce digitally with full fidelity. We describe the test format and identify each picture's missing part.

The 1 subtests

#1
10 picture-completion items Each picture shows a common scene with one small part missing. Subject identifies the missing part. Healy's original 10 items are: house (chimney missing), person (leg), violin (strings), light bulb (filament), envelope (stamp), and 5 others.
Interactive

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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.

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About these items: These Healy Pictorial Completion Test items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1914 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. See the original source for the authentic 1914-era items in their original administration format.

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: view the original publication.

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This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS

Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.

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