Information about Bender Gestalt Test

The Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test or simply the Bender-Gestalt test is a psychological test first developed by child neuropsychiatrist Lauretta Bender. The test is used to evaluate "visual-motor maturity", to screen for developmental disorders, or to assess neurological function or brain damage.

The test consists of nine figures, each on its own 3 × 5 card. The subject is shown each figure and asked to copy it onto a piece of blank paper. The test typically takes 10-20 minutes, after which the results are scored based on accuracy and other characteristics.

Bender first described her Visual Motor Gestalt Test in an 1938 monograph entitled: A Visual Motor Gestalt Test and Its Clinical Use. The figures were derived from the work of the famous Gestalt psychologist Wertheimer. The Bender-Gestalt test as it is now often called, is typically among the top five tests used by clinical psychologists. It measures perceptual motor skills, perceptual motor development and gives an indication of neurological intactness. It has been used as a personality test and a test of emotional problems.

The test has been used as a screening device for brain damage. Bender herself said it was "a method of evaluating maturation of gestalt functioning children 4-11's brain functioning by which it responds to a given constellation of stimuli as a whole, the response being a motor process of patterning the perceived gestalt."


Psychological testing is a field characterized by the use of samples of behavior in order to infer generalizations about a given individual. The technical term for the science behind psychological testing is psychometrics.
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Neuropsychiatry is the branch of medicine dealing with mental disorders attributable to diseases of the nervous system.

It preceded the current disciplines of psychiatry and neurology, in as much as psychiatrists and neurologists had a common training (Yodofsky and Hales,
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Lauretta Bender, M.D. (1897–1987) was a child neuropsychiatrist, best known as the creator of the Bender-Gestalt Test.

Her father was an attorney. She repeated first grade 3 times; she was thought to be mentally retarded because she reversed letters in reading and
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Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt theory of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Max Wertheimer (April 15, 1880 – October 12, 1943) was a Czech-born Jewish psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler.
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