Schulte Tables: What They Really Measure and How to Train on Them Properly

A Schulte table looks unremarkable: a 5×5 square with the numbers 1 to 25 scattered at random. The task sounds trivial too — find them all in order, as fast as you can. Yet this simple test has served psychologists for decades as a measure of attention, and speed-reading learners as a drill for eye discipline. In this article we cover where Schulte tables come from, what they actually measure, what times count as good, how to practice correctly (most people do it wrong) and what results you can realistically expect.

Where Schulte tables come from

The name comes from Walter Schulte (1910–1972), a German psychiatrist and professor at the University of Tübingen. Schulte devised the grids as a psychodiagnostic tool — a simple, repeatable way to examine visual search speed and the fatigue resistance of attention. The test had its biggest career in occupational psychology: for years it was used in aptitude testing wherever concentration under time pressure matters.

Modifications followed. The best known is the red-black table (the Gorbov–Schulte variant), where you alternate between black numbers in ascending order and red ones in descending order — no longer just a speed test but a test of attention switchingbetween two tasks. Schulte grids are still used in modern research as a visual search paradigm — for instance, a 2022 ERP study used them to analyze the brain's attention mechanisms during dual-color target search (Lu et al., 2022).

What the table actually measures

A Schulte table score is the product of three things: selective visual attention(the ability to ignore the 23 numbers you're not currently looking for), processing speed (how quickly you recognize and verify candidates), and your eye strategy — whether you scan chaotically, sweep row by row, or keep your gaze centered and use peripheral vision.

In classic diagnostics what mattered was not just the time for one table but the stability of results across a series: if your fifth table goes noticeably slower than your first, that signals attentional fatigue. A meaningful measurement is therefore always a series, never a single score.

One caveat about these numbers: they come from the psychodiagnostic literature and describe first attempts, before training. After a few weeks of practice nearly everyone's times drop — and that's not cheating, just normal learning. A nice property of the tables: numbers are universal, so scores don't depend on language — you can compare yourself with anyone.

How to practice correctly — the protocol

The most common mistake looks like this: the eyes sweep the grid row by row, as in reading. Times may drop, but you're then training ordinary scanning — something your eyes do daily without any practice. The point of Schulte tables starts with one rule:

• Keep your gaze on the center of the grid.Find the numbers "out of the corner of your eye", without letting your gaze wander across the grid. At first this is frustratingly hard — which is exactly why it works.
• No finger, no head movement. Only the eyes work — and eventually mostly attention, not the eyes.
• A series of 3–5 timed tables.Record each table's time separately; the gap between the first and the last says more than the average.
• 5–10 minutes a day. A short daily session beats rare long ones — as in any perceptual training.
• Raise difficulty only when it gets boring. Stable times under ~25 s with a centered gaze are the signal to move to a harder variant.

What the science says — honestly

Two things are well documented. First, Schulte tables are a reliable measurement tool for attention and visual search speed — which is why they still appear in research (Lu et al., 2022). Second, times clearly improve with practice — the classic task-training effect.

What's less certain is what some courses promise: that the tables "widen your field of vision" and directly speed up reading. Physiologically your visual field doesn't change — what changes is how efficiently you use its periphery and how well you discipline your fixations. The window in which you can identify letters during a single fixation is limited to roughly 3–4 characters to the left and 14–15 to the right (McConkie & Rayner, 1975), and reading itself is a sequence of fixations and saccades (Rayner, 1998) — more in our article on how many words per minute people read. Schulte training may help indirectly: it teaches you to hold a fixation point and pull information from the periphery instead of reading everything head-on. But hard studies showing transfer from the tables to reading speed simply don't exist — anyone claiming otherwise is selling a promise. We describe the healthy approach in our article on speed reading myths and facts.

Variants for when the classic gets stale

• Red-black (Gorbov–Schulte) — black ascending, red descending, alternating. Attention-switching training.
• Letters instead of numbers — the alphabet disables the counting autopilot and forces fresh search.
• Board rotation — the grid rotates as you search, forcing constant updates of your spatial map.
• Fading numbers — found cells go dark or all numbers slowly fade; time and memory pressure grow.
• Bigger grids (6×6, 7×7) — only once a centered-gaze 5×5 becomes routine.

Where to practice: app, browser, paper

You can try an interactive Schulte table right now in the Speble exercises section — in your browser, no account needed. In the app, Schulte is one of six visual drills: levels, rotation and fading variants, points and a daily streak that keeps you consistent.

If you prefer paper — and it's genuinely a good option, because a sheet of paper has no notifications — use the Schulte table generator at focustables.com: pick a size and variant, download the PDF and print it. There are also ready-made printable table sets to get you started. Print a few, keep them at your desk and do one series with your morning coffee — the simplest way to make the training actually happen.

Sources

• Lu, A., Wang, D., He, S., Zhongcheng, Q., Zhang, W., & Li, Z. (2022). Attention mechanisms underlying dual-color digital visual search based on Schulte grid: An event-related potential study. Brain and Behavior, 12(2), e2471. doi:10.1002/brb3.2471
• Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 372–422. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.124.3.372
• McConkie, G. W., & Rayner, K. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17, 578–586. doi:10.3758/BF03203972