To determine whether or not cognitive tempo influences visual cue preferences in early readers, 65 kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade children were tested on the Matching Familiar Figures (MFF) test and a cue selection nonsense trigram test. It was hypothesized that significant differences would be found in cue selection strategies of subjects at each grade and over all grades, with subjects exhibiting varying impulsivity and efficiency scores. Further, it was hypothesized that there would be a developmental trend in impulsivity and efficiency scores and on the cue selection preference task. Trends in cue selection for data pooled across all grade levels supported the hypothesis for an order by ranking of preferred cue (specifically, first letter, last letter, middle letter, and word shape). An examination of the data for the amount of influence impulsivity or efficiency scores had on cue preference indicated that neither had any truly predictive ability. Results were interpreted to indicate that cognitive tempo is developmental in nature. It was concluded that, since visual cue preference is not significantly influenced by impulsivity or efficiency, the initial step in reading instruction could be the training of all subjects in initial position visual focusing on word recognition tasks. (Author/RH)