Benton Visual Retention Test
Abbreviation: BVRT
Background
In 1945, Arthur Benton described in a journal article1) a simple, clinically applicable visual memory test, which was published a year later under the same title as a test by the Psychological Corporation. In this test, the examinee is to memorize simple visual designs after a brief viewing time and to draw them from memory immediately afterward. Benton developed this test as a complement to the verbal memory tests that had already existed for a long time. The procedure quickly gained international distribution. In 1955, a revised version with parallel series of designs appeared. This was the basis for the first German version2), edited by Otfried Spreen, which was published under the simplified name Benton Test and is occasionally abbreviated simply as BT. The eighth German edition is now available3). In the more recent editions, practically nothing has changed in the basic form of the test; the manuals have mainly incorporated more recent normative and validity data. However, a consolidated synthesis of the various norms has never been attempted in the manuals.
Test material
The copyright for the German adaptation of the procedure is held by Hogrefe. The manual and test material are available through the Testzentrale (test distributor) in Germany or Switzerland.
The German test kit contains three design booklets. Among other things, they contain three design series of 10 drawings each. These three design series are labeled C, D, and E. Series C is the most frequently used design series. Series D and E are normally used only for repeated measurements.
In addition to this classic test material, the German test kit contains designs that can be used for recognition (instead of drawing) of the figures, as well as extended designs with 20 drawings each. The normative situation for these extensions is clearly worse than for the original version. They are therefore not included in TDB2Online.
Test administration
The standard test instructions for administration are those designated in the manual as Instruction A. They provide for a presentation time of 10 seconds; immediately after the presentation, the drawing is to be reproduced from memory.
Since the 1950s, there have been many variants in addition to the standard instructions. In Instruction B, the presentation time is reduced to 5 seconds. Instruction C is not a memory test but only requires copying the designs. Instruction D inserts a pause of 15 seconds between presentation and reproduction. Most norming studies refer exclusively to Form C and Instruction A. The additional variants can be highly useful in clinical application (for example, to test the drawing ability of individuals independently of visual memory). However, their norms are too weak for a psychometric treatment.
Test raw scores
Scoring the Benton Test requires careful examination of the reproductions. For this, one must be familiar with the scoring guidelines and have a certain amount of experience with the test. There is one raw score each for the “Number Correct”, that is, the number of designs reproduced without error, and the “Errors”, the number of errors made while drawing (several errors can be made on one design). In TDB2Online, only these two raw scores are used.
Distributional properties of the raw scores
The processing of the Benton norms is based on the norming studies analyzed in Mitrushina et al. (2005)4), not on a literature review going beyond that. As far as could be determined from the studies reported there, no studies reported percentile distributions. Of course, assumptions about the distribution shapes can easily be made: If the expected number of correct reproductions in young adults is around 8 (with a raw score range of 0 to 10), then the raw score distribution will be strongly skewed because it hits the upper ceiling. However, we have no real data on this and can therefore only calculate with the reported means and standard deviations. A linearization of the measurement scales for Number Correct and Errors is therefore not possible.
Norming studies
see detailed test documentation
Meta-analytic summary of the norms
see detailed test documentation
Overview of performance norms and age norms
see detailed test documentation
Discussion
The Benton Test is - given some experience in administration and scoring - an economical test for assessing visual memory in clinical settings. It may have lost some of its earlier popularity, which was partly based on unrealistic expectations regarding sensitivity to all possible neuropsychological impairments. However, it is still a good test when an assessment of visual memory is to be carried out, whether as a complement to verbal memory or independently of it.
Similar to the AVLT, the psychometric properties of the test are only moderate. The test ceiling is quite low, so very good performance cannot be measured. The two parameters correlate very highly with each other. Especially for the errors, a very strong dependence of the variance on the mean (across age) must be noted, a consequence of the lack of linearization of the scale.