Effects of serial position of relevant cue in the rehearsal order and method of encoding on attention in a single cue concept identification task

Five groups of Ss were forced to encode briefly exposed stimuli in a prescribed order and to classify the stimulus as a negative or a positive instance of the concept. For the first four groups, trials to criterion were found to be a function of the ordinal position of the relevant cue in the encoding order. These groups were forced to encode in an ungrammatical order. The fifth group employed a grammatical order of encoding and the position of the relevant cue was randomly assigned to an S. The fifth group was found to be superior to the other four groups as measured by trials to criterion