First proposed by Swiss psychologist André Rey in 1941 and further standardized by Paul-Alexandre Osterrieth in 1944, it is frequently used to further explain any secondary effect of brain injury in neurological patients, to test for the presence of dementia, or to study the degree of cognitive development in children.

[1][2] During the 1940s, psychologists throughout the world were facing difficulty in eliciting the specific deficits exhibited by individuals (both adults and children) who had experienced traumatic brain injury.

Unlike Rey, Osterrieth was primarily interested in the measure as an assessment of whether or not children had developed the concept of a holistic or gestalt principle by various ages, as manifested by the way they approached the figure drawing.

He also noted several different approaches that the children used in constructing the figure, each of which appeared to be roughly correlated with a particular age group: Additionally, Osterrieth noticed that strategy was a good predictor of the child's performance on all three of the various tasks.

In 1959 American (German immigrant)[citation needed] child psychologist Edith Meyer Taylor, who had been a student of Arnold Gesell and Jean Piaget, gave more elaborate descriptions on the 18-point scoring system initially proposed by Osterrieth.