Definition
As the name suggests, the bicycle drawing test requires patients to draw a picture of a bicycle in freehand using a pencil. It can be a useful measure of visual-spatial and visual-motor impairments and also has been used in the assessment of hemi-neglect syndromes. Typically, the patient is asked to draw a copy of a simple line drawn picture of a bicycle. Many clinicians first ask the patient to draw a bicycle in freehand from their own memory, to assess their constructional ability in the absence of a model.
History and Clinical Evidence
The bicycle drawing test is widely associated with Piaget’s (1955) investigations of cognitive development, though similar tests seem to have been employed earlier (Poppelreuter 1990; Veiders 1934). Neuropsychological investigations of focal unilateral lesions (Hecaen and Assal 1970) have demonstrated differences in performance between patients with left- and right-sided posterior brain lesions. Such comparisons have also suggested...
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References and Readings
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Cohen, R.A. (2018). Bicycle Drawing Test. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1345
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1345
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