Schulte table test
Tap the numbers from 1 to 25 in order, as fast as you can. No published norm exists for the Schulte table itself, so Headgame is building its own, and its closest parent test, Trail Making A, has a reliability of 0.87 (Woods et al., 2015c).
Tap 1 to 25 in order.
A 5 by 5 grid of shuffled numbers. Find 1, then 2, up to 25. The clock runs from the first tap you can make, each wrong tap adds one second.
How the table works
The 25 numbers are shuffled on a 5 by 5 grid. Find and tap 1, then 2, and so on up to 25. Found numbers stay marked so you do not search them again. Your score is the total time in seconds, plus one second for every wrong tap, rounded to the tenth.
The task asks your eyes to search, not your memory. Most of the time goes into scanning the grid for the next number, which is why people who do it often get faster at it.
What is a good time?
We have not found a published norm for the Schulte table with a known sample, so this page does not show a percentile. Numbers that circulate online have no source we could check, and we prefer to show nothing than a borrowed figure.
Headgame is collecting its own norm from anonymous games on this site and in the app. It will be published on the norms page once it reaches 1,000 games, split by phone and computer, with its date.
The scientific parent, the Trail Making Test
In the Trail Making Test A, used in neuropsychology for decades, you connect numbered circles in order. It is the closest validated relative of the Schulte table. A computerized version tested on 165 people showed that completion times rise with age, and a group of 50 people tested three times showed good test retest reliability, about 0.87 for part A (Woods et al., 2015c).
The same study found learning effects between sessions. Expect your own times to drop over the first games, then settle.
What the research says about benefits
You will read online that Schulte tables develop speed reading or peripheral vision. We found no study that tests these claims on the Schulte table itself. What is well documented is that scores on a repeated test rise with practice (Scharfen et al., 2018a), and that gains on a trained task transfer little to everyday life (Simons et al., 2016). The full review is in Schulte table benefits, what the research says.
Questions
Is the Schulte table good for the brain?
There is no good evidence for that claim. Practice makes you faster at the table, and the research on brain training finds little transfer from a trained task to other tasks (Simons et al., 2016).
Why does a wrong tap add one second?
So that tapping everywhere fast does not pay. It is the same rule as in the Headgame app, so a score here and a score in the app mean the same thing.
What this test does not tell you
It measures how fast you find 25 numbers in order on this screen. It does not measure intelligence, reading speed or vision.
There is no public norm yet. Compare your time with your own earlier times, on the same device and the same screen size.
Sources
- Woods D.L., Wyma J.M., Herron T.J., Yund E.W. (2015). The effects of aging, malingering, and traumatic brain injury on computerized Trail-Making Test performance. PLoS One 10(6), e0124345. PMC4465490. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124345
- Scharfen J., Peters J.M., Holling H. (2018). Retest effects in cognitive ability tests, a meta-analysis. Intelligence 67, 44 to 66. doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2018.01.003
- Simons D.J., Boot W.R., Charness N. et al. (2016). Do brain training programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest 17(3), 103 to 186. doi.org/10.1177/1529100616661983
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