The Influence of Pictorials on the Comprehension and Retention of Pharmaceutical Information,
Abstract
To evaluate the practice of communicating information using various pictorial/text formats, fictitious yet realistic-appearing medication instruction sheets were created that presented eight dosing instructions in the following formats: text alone, pictorials alone, fully redundant text and pictorials, text with four instructions accompanied by pictorials (incomplete pictorials), and no instructions (control). Following exposure to one of the instruction sheets, participants were given recall tests on the content of the medication information. Results demonstrated that instructions from the fully redundant text and pictorials format were recalled more often than instructions from the other formats. In addition, there were no differences in recall between the text alone and incomplete pictorials formats, with the pictorials alone and control formats producing the poorest recall. Also, the fully redundant text and pictorials format was given higher ratings than the other formats, with no differences between the text alone and incomplete pictorials formats. The pictorials alone and control formats received the lowest ratings. Prior to the mid 1980s, there was virtually no published experimental research on product warnings. Since then, research has begun to investigate how warnings influence people's knowledge and cautionary behavior. A multitude of factors have been investigated, with an emphasis on warnings' influence during human information processing. Warnings' Influence on Human Information Processing Many of the processes associated with warning effectiveness can be organized using one of several models of human information processing (see Wogalter & Sojourner, in press). This modeling approach categorizes people's mental activities into a coherent sequence of processing stages.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 22, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA325579
Entities
People
- Russell J. Sojourner
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology