Schulte table benefits, or what the task asks of you and what your time shows
· 5 min read · Tyamka team
People search for Schulte table benefits. What we can and cannot promise, what the task asks of you while you play, what your time shows and what it does not.
Search for Schulte table benefits and you will find long lists. Better focus, faster reading, sharper memory, a calmer mind. The pages we checked gave no source for these claims, and some of them sell a course or an app. We make a game with Schulte tables, our Schulte table online, and our answer is shorter than those lists.
What we can and cannot promise
A Schulte table is a task. While you do it, it asks certain things of you, and your time shows how well you managed them on that grid, that day.
At the table itself you will quite possibly get faster. Practice usually makes a repeated task more familiar. You learn where to look, lose count less often and make fewer wrong taps, and that shows in your times.
Whether getting faster at a Schulte table makes you faster at reading, better at work or more focused in general is a different question. Many sites answer it with a confident yes. We make no such claim, for this table or for any of our games. What research says about brain training in general is covered in does brain training work.
What the task asks of you
Finding 25 numbers in order looks like one simple thing. In practice several things happen at once.
- Searching among similar items. Every cell looks roughly the same, a number in a square. You cannot find 14 by its shape or colour, only by looking at cells until you hit it.
- Keeping the target in mind. At every moment you need to know which number comes next, and to update it the instant you find one. Lose count, and you start searching for a number you already found.
- Ignoring what does not matter. Every number you have already found is still on the grid, and so are all the ones that come later. When you look for 9, the 19 next to it is a distraction. In the red-black variant, the same number in the wrong colour is a trap.
- Moving your eyes. On a 5×5 grid you can see most of the table without moving your eyes far. Some people scan row by row, some keep their gaze near the centre. How you look changes your time.
- Acting on what you see. On a screen each number needs a tap, on paper a point of the finger or a word. That takes time too, and a quick hand makes a real difference on a phone.
- Staying with it. Even a short round asks you to keep searching from the first number to the last without drifting off.
You do the same things when you look for a name in a list or a key on a keyboard you do not know. The table packs them into a short round with a timer.
Why the table was used in psychology
The tables are named after the German psychiatrist Walter Schulte and were first used as a diagnostic tool, a way to look at how a person holds attention on a simple task. Researchers still use them in experiments. In one study from 2021, for example, ten adults aged 18 to 20 did 5×5 tables on a tablet while their brain activity was recorded.
In those settings the table is used under controlled conditions, with the same instructions and materials for everyone. A game in a browser is not that, and your time in a game is not a test result.
What your time shows
Your time shows how quickly you found the numbers in order on this grid, on this device, today. If it gets shorter over a few weeks of play, you have got faster at this task.
Time is affected by a lot of things besides attention:
- how lucky the layout was, since some shuffles put the first numbers close together
- the device, a mouse, a touchscreen or a finger on paper
- how many rounds you have already played today
- sleep, noise and what else is on your mind
- how many mistakes you made and how long they cost you
Because of all this, compare your time with your own earlier times on the same grid, not with a number from the internet. We looked at the numbers different sites give for adults and found they disagree several times over. The details are in the article on the Schulte table average time.
What your time does not show
A Schulte table time measures only this task. It is not a measure of your attention in everyday life or of how well you read, and it says nothing about your health.
It also does not say how you compare with other people. We do not show rankings against "average players" in our game, because we have no honest data to build them on.
Playing it for its own sake
If you enjoy the table, there is nothing wrong with playing it just for that. Some ways people use it:
- as a short game of a minute or two between other things
- as a way to watch their own times change over a few weeks
- as a harder puzzle, by moving on to reverse order, bigger grids or the red-black version
That last one is covered in the article on Schulte table variants. If you are new to the tables, start with what a Schulte table is.
How our game handles it
In Tyamka the Schulte table has 15 levels, from a 3×3 grid to 7×7, with some levels counting down and some reshuffling the grid after every correct tap. You have three lives per level, and each correct tap earns 10 points plus a bonus of up to 10 for speed. After each level the game shows your points, the speed bonus, the time, the number of mistakes and your previous best score on that level. The best is kept in points, separately for every level, so a round only competes with earlier rounds on the same level.
Points and your best show how you did in this game. We do not claim that the game improves memory or attention outside it. More games for focus and memory are on the all games page.