PSYCHIATRIC ANTECEDENTS
OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING
Most historians trace the beginnings of psychological
testing to the experimental investigation of individual
differences that flourished in Germany and
Great Britain in the late 1800s. There is no doubt
that early experimentalists such as Wilhelm Wundt,
Francis Galton, and James McKeen Cattell laid the
foundations for modern-day testing, and we will review
their contributions in detail. But psychological
testing owes as much to early psychiatry as it
does to the laboratories of experimental psychology.
In fact, the examination of the mentally ill
around the middle of the nineteenth century resulted
in the development of numerous early tests
(Bondy, 1974). These early tests featured the absence
of standardization and were consequently
relegated to oblivion. They were nonetheless influential
in determining the course of psychological
testing, so it is important to mention a few typical
developments from this era.
In 1885, the German physician Hubert von
Grashey developed the antecedent of the memory
drum as a means of testing brain-injured patients.
His subjects were shown words, symbols, or pictures
through a slot in a sheet of paper that was
moving slowly over the stimuli. Grashey found that
many patients could recognize stimuli in their totality
but could not identify them when shown through the moving slot. Shortly thereafter, the
German psychiatrist Conrad Rieger developed an
excessively ambitious test battery for brain damage.
His battery took over 100 hours to administer
and soon fell out of favor.