Lauretta Bender - The Bender-Gestalt Test

Psychiatrist, born in Butte, Montana, USA. She received her MD from the State University of Iowa in 1926. A senior psychiatrist at New York City's Bellevue Hospital (1930–56), she did important research in childhood schizophrenia and brain injury, and devised the Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test. In 1936 she married her colleague Paul F Schilder, a highly regarded psychoanalyst who had practised in Vienna. From 1956 she was principal research scientist at three major New York State mental health facilities. Her Bellevue Studies series (4 vols, 1952–5) was a major contribution to the literature on child psychology.

Lauretta Bender, MD was a child neuropsychiatrist who was born in 1897, best known as the creator of the Bender-Gestalt Test.

The Bender-Gestalt Test

She is best known for her Visual Motor Gestalt Test described in an 1938 monograph. Lauretta Bender wrote in 1938 a Monograph entitled: A Visual Motor Gestalt Test and Its Clinical Use. The test consists of reproducing 9 figures that are printed on cards. The Bender-Gestalt test as it is now often called, is typically among the top five test used by clinical psychologists. It measures perceptual motor skills, perceptual motor development and gives an indication of neuroloical intactness. It has been used a personality test and a test of emotional problems.

Scoring system include:

Elizabeth M. Arthur Canter's Background Interference Procedure (BIP) test for organicty (1976)

Patrica Lacks uses it 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." Bender was a contemporary of David Wechsler, Ph.D., creator of the famous intelligence tests.