Schulte table benefits, what the research says

What a Schulte table is

A Schulte table is a grid of shuffled numbers, usually 5 by 5, that you find and point to in order from 1 to 25 as fast as possible. It is commonly attributed to the German psychiatrist Walter Schulte, an origin we have not yet checked in a primary source, and it is popular in speed reading courses and in apps that promise better focus.

Mechanically, it is a visual search task with a sequence. Your eyes scan the grid, find the next number, and your hand follows. The time depends on how fast you scan, how well you keep your place, and how familiar you are with the layout of numbers on a grid.

What you read online

Pages about the Schulte table often promise faster reading, a wider field of vision, better concentration or a younger brain. We searched for published studies that test these claims on the Schulte table itself and found none with a measured effect or even a measured reliability.

That does not prove the claims false. It means nobody has shown them. A page that states them as facts is ahead of the evidence, and the law has punished brain game companies for exactly that kind of promise (FTC, 2016).

The reliable parent, the Trail Making Test

The closest validated task is the Trail Making Test A, where you connect numbered circles in order. It has been used in neuropsychology for decades. A computerized version tested on 165 people showed that completion time rises with age, and 50 people tested three times showed good test retest reliability, about 0.87 for part A (Woods et al., 2015c).

So the family of tasks the Schulte table belongs to can give a stable measure of visual search speed. That is useful for a score, and it is the reason Headgame uses a 5 by 5 grid in its Reflexes stat.

What you can honestly expect

If you practise, your time will drop. Scores on any repeated cognitive test rise, partly because you learn the test itself (Scharfen et al., 2018a), and the Trail Making study above also saw learning effects across sessions (Woods et al., 2015c).

What the large review of brain training found is that practice raises scores on the trained task, has less effect on closely related tasks, and little effect on distant tasks or everyday life (Simons et al., 2016). A faster Schulte time is a faster Schulte time. Enjoy it for that.

How Headgame uses it

In the app, the Grid game is a 5 by 5 Schulte table, with one second added per wrong tap. It counts in your Reflexes stat with a provisional norm, until Headgame has collected 1,000 games and can publish its own. You can play it right now, free, in the Schulte table test.

Sources

1. 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
2. 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
3. Federal Trade Commission (5 January 2016). Lumosity to pay $2 million to settle FTC deceptive advertising charges for its brain training program. ftc.gov, press release of 5 January 2016
4. 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