Attention, short-term memory, and academic performance

In order to evaluate the relationship between attention and academic performance, 132 novel Russian-letter trigrams were presented individually for two sec, then one of 132 response-recognition quadrigae of trigrams, containing the previously shown stimulus trigram and three foils, was shown for two sec. The S's task was to choose the correct response trigram from among the quadriga. Large differences in performance occurred, depending upon which element of the trigram was varied in the response quadrigae. An interaction between the varying element in the trigram and the position of the particular trigram within the overall list also occurred. Correlations between performance on this task and the academic performance of the students were all essentially zero. HA