Primacy effects in attention, recall and judgment patterns of simultaneously presented student information: Evidence from an eye-tracking study

Social cognition research has demonstrated that processes of memory and judgment formation are not only affected by information type but also by the sequence in which this information is received. These sequence (i.e. primacy and recency) effects are of special interest if the first or last information activates a social category, as this may increase the risk of stereotypical biases in decision making. This may be especially pertinent to the educational domain as studies have shown teachers´ judgments are influenced not only by students´ academic achievement but also their social background. Therefore, this study investigated primacy effects in the assessment of student performance. This study not only assessed the impact of sequence on memory and judgment, but also measured attention via eye-tracking techniques, hence offering a more detailed test of the assumption of the primacy effect (i.e. increased attention to the first piece of information).
Forty participants were presented four student descriptions, containing information on the student’s grades, standardized test results, working behavior and social background. For half of the participants, social background information was presented in the top left position on the screen and grade information in the top right position. For the other half these positions were switched. The sequence of information was therefore not predefined by the experimenter, but left to the participant, however, given the left-to-right and top-to-bottom orientation common in Western European languages, the information in the top-left position was expected to draw initial attention of participants. After reading each student description, participants recommended a fitting secondary school track and later recalled student information. The design of the study is a 2×2 factorial design, with the position order (social background vs. grades in top-left position) as a between-subject factor and type of information (social background vs. grades) as a within-subject factor.
According our expectations, eye-movements (i.e. fixations during the first second of presentation), showed a significant effect of the position order. Information in the top-left position received not only more initial attention, but also more attention throughout, than the same information positioned in the top-right position, thus indicating a primacy effect in attention. This result was only partially reflected in the recall data, and no differences resulted in the accuracy of judgments.
The results confirmed that the positioning of simultaneously presented information leads to a primacy effect in attention, but does not produce primacy effects in subsequent memory and judgments. In regard to the common structure of various dossiers and records, which first list a student’s name and personal information, these findings imply that such structure may maximize teachers’ attention to social background information, stating a potential source of social disparities in educational systems.