Schulte Table
A 5×5 grid, its 25 numbers scattered. Find them in order, 1 to 25, as fast as you can. There is nothing to work out and no trick to learn — which is exactly why the time it takes says something about your attention rather than your arithmetic. Free, no account, runs in your browser.
Take the test
Tap the numbers in order. Start at 1, finish at 25.
Tap the letters in order. Start at A, finish at Y.
READY
0
seconds to find all 25
That is your search time. It falls as scanning gets more systematic — most of the gain comes from resisting the urge to start over from a corner.
- Per number
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- Errors
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- Grid
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Nothing is uploaded; your time stays in this tab. Tap a wrong cell and the clock keeps running.
That was a single run. In the app it becomes a short daily session, with a Focus Index to show for it.
Point your camera at the code — the App Store opens.
What the Schulte table measures
Every individual step is trivial: you know what 14 looks like. The difficulty is entirely in the searching — holding a target in mind, sweeping the grid without losing your place, and not drifting back over ground you have already covered.
That makes it a clean measure of visual search and of attention holding steady across a minute of dull, repetitive work. It is also unusually resistant to being good at things: no vocabulary, no arithmetic, no cultural knowledge helps you here.
What separates a fast run from a slow one is mostly strategy. Fast searchers move through the grid in a consistent pattern and trust themselves not to have missed anything. Slow searchers restart from a corner every time the number is not where they expected — and pay for it 25 times over.
Two grids: numbers or letters
Same board, same clock, same score — the switch above the table only changes what is printed in the cells.
Numbers is the classic table: 1 to 25, in counting order. Letters deals A to Y onto the same 5×5 grid — 25 cells, 25 letters, so the alphabet fits it exactly with only Z left over — and asks for alphabetical order instead. Nothing about the searching changes, which is the point: your two times are directly comparable.
What does change is what you carry while you search: counting to 25 and reciting the alphabet are not equally automatic, and which of them costs you more is personal — it depends on the script you learned to read in as much as anything else. If your letters time is slower than your numbers time, that gap is the price of holding a less practiced sequence in mind, not a different kind of attention. We publish no norms for either grid; the comparison worth making is between your own two times. Switching the grid clears the board, because half a run of digits and half a run of letters is not a time worth keeping.
Where it comes from
- 1950s
A clinic tool, not a puzzle
The tables are commonly credited to Walter Schulte, a German psychiatrist, as a bedside way to watch attention hold up — or fall apart — over a task with no thinking in it at all. Every cell is trivial; only finding it is hard.
- Later
Adopted unevenly
The method became a fixture of Russian-language clinical and school practice, where it is still routine. Western psychometrics largely went with other search tasks instead, which is why you will find plenty of tables online and very few published norms.
- Today
Popular for claims it cannot support
Speed-reading courses sell Schulte tables as peripheral-vision training. Getting faster at the table is real and quick; evidence that it makes you read faster is thin. Treat the transfer claim as marketing and the search time as a measurement.
How to read your result
Three numbers, and only the first one is the score. The other two explain it.
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Total time
Seconds from Start to the moment you tap 25. The headline number, and the only one worth comparing across your own runs.
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Per number
Your total divided by the cells. Useful because it stays comparable if you ever run a different grid size, where the total obviously would not.
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Errors
Taps on the wrong cell. The clock keeps running and the target does not move on, so errors already cost you time — the count just tells you where it went.
What this version cannot tell you
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Screen size changes the task
On a phone the whole grid sits inside central vision; on a desktop monitor your eyes have to travel. The same person will post different times on different screens, and neither is wrong.
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One run is mostly noise
Search time swings widely with how alert you are and where the numbers happened to land. Three runs tell you something a single one cannot.
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You improve at the table, fast
Most people take a big step down in the first few attempts. That is strategy, not attention — you stop re-scanning from a corner. Expect the gains to flatten quickly.
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It is not a diagnosis
The table is used in clinical settings, always alongside other measures and read by someone qualified. A slow run here means you had a slow run here.
Questions about the Schulte table
What is a Schulte table?
A 5×5 grid with the numbers 1 to 25 scattered across it, one per cell. The task is to find them in order, as fast as you can, and the measurement is simply how long that takes. Nothing has to be worked out — which is the point: with no thinking in the way, what is left is how steadily you can search. It came out of clinical practice in the 1950s and is now more often met as a browser exercise than as a bedside one.
What is a good Schulte table time?
Published figures for a 5×5 table cluster somewhere around 30 to 45 seconds for adults, but we would rather you did not lean on that. The number depends on your screen, your input device, whether you are on a phone or a mouse, and how many times you have played. Your own third or fourth run on the same device is the only honest baseline you have.
Does the Schulte table train peripheral vision?
That claim comes from speed-reading courses, not from the clinical use of the tables. You will get faster at the table — that part is real and happens quickly — but the evidence that it widens your useful field of view or makes you read faster is weak. We show you the search time because the search time is measurable; we are not going to promise you the rest.
Is there a Schulte table with letters?
Yes — the switch above the table turns the 5×5 grid into A to Y and asks for alphabetical order. The alphabet fits the board exactly: 25 cells, 25 letters, with only Z left out. Everything else is unchanged, so your letters time and your numbers time are measured the same way and can be compared to each other. If letters come out slower for you, that is the price of holding a less automatic sequence than counting — we publish no figures for how common that is, and your own two times are the comparison worth making.
What happens if I tap the wrong number?
A wrong tap on the Schulte table counts as an error and the clock keeps running, but the target does not move on — you still have to find the number you were looking for. That mirrors the version in the NEURA app, where a round stays open until the correct cell is tapped.
Why do the numbers move every time?
A fresh shuffle of the Schulte table is generated in your browser on every run. If the layout were fixed, your second attempt would measure how well you remembered the board rather than how fast you can search it.
Are there average Schulte table times by age?
Tables of times by age group circulate widely and almost none of them say where the numbers came from, how many people were measured or on what equipment. We publish no norms of our own, so we are not going to add another unsourced table to the pile. What can be said honestly is that published figures for adults on a 5×5 table cluster in the thirty-to-forty-five-second region, that children are generally slower than adults, and that the screen you are on moves the number enough to swamp small differences between groups.
Do I need an account?
No. The Schulte table runs entirely in your browser, nothing is submitted, and your time is shown to you and then gone when you close the tab.
One run is a snapshot. The trend is the point.
In NEURA the table grows as you get better, and its result joins the rest of the catalog — 19 games — in a single Focus Index, so what you watch is your attention over weeks, not one time from one afternoon. That is the part a single page cannot do.
