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Pictures enhance our comprehension of written texts, but the perceptual and cognitive processes that underlie this effect have not been identified. Because integrating the information contained in a text places demands on working memory, the effect of a picture may be to expand the functional capacity of working memory and thereby to facilitate comprehension. Reasoning thus, we predicted that the availability of a diagram would interact with the difficulty of resolving anaphoric references in texts. The resolution of an anaphor distant from its antecedent (which should stress working memory) should benefit greatly from the presentation of a picture, whereas the ...

This research examined two factors involved in the evaluation of pictorial symbol comprehension: context (absence vs. presence of photographs depicting the probable environments where a symbol would be seen) and test method (multiple-choice with less vs. more plausible distractor alternatives vs. open-ended). We tested 33 pictorial symbols from various sources. The results showed that the multiple-choice test with less plausible distractors inflated comprehension scores by an average of 30% compared with the other two tests, which did not differ. The presence of context increased symbol comprehension in the open-ended test and in the multiple-choice test that had more plausible distractors. ...

Spatial representations, such as maps, charts, and graphs, convey different levels of information, depending on how their elements are grouped into different units of objects. Therefore, how people set boundaries to graphical objects to be interpreted and how they maintain the object boundaries during the given task are two important problems in understanding the way people utilize spatial representations for problem-solving. Table comprehension process was experimentally investigated in terms of eye gaze control behaviors when people were required to read off􀀀 information distributed over large-scale objects, e.g., a row or a column, of the given table. Evidence was found that a large-scale object can ...

Patients want and need comprehensive and accurate information about their medicines so that they can participate in decisions about their healthcare. In particular, they require information about the likely risks and benefits that are associated with the different treatment options. However, to provide this information in a form that people can readily understand and use is a considerable challenge to healthcare professionals. One recent attempt to standardise the language of risk has been to produce sets of verbal descriptors that correspond to specific probability ranges, such as those outlined in the European Commission (EC) Pharmaceutical Committee guidelines in ...

Patients want and need comprehensive and accurate information about their medicines so that they can participate in decisions about their healthcare. In particular, they require information about the likely risks and benefits that are associated with the different treatment options. However, to provide this information in a form that people can readily understand and use is a considerable challenge to healthcare professionals. One recent attempt to standardise the language of risk has been to produce sets of verbal descriptors that correspond to specific probability ranges, such as those outlined in the European Commission (EC) Pharmaceutical Committee guidelines in ...

Background: All licensed medicines in the European Union must be provided with a Patient Information Leaflet that includes a list of all known side effects. Among patients who read the leaflet, the side effects section is the most often read. A UK government regulatory publication recommends providing medicine side effect risk information in a combined format, using verbal descriptors accompanied by numerical information. Objectives: This study, with users of an existing popular patient information website, investigates the effectiveness of presenting medicine side effect risk information in different forms. Design: Participants were randomly allocated to one of the three formats for representing risk information ...

This study examines the way side effects information is presented in patient information leaflets. In a field experiment, we tested the effects of two attempts to improve a side effects paragraph in a leaflet about a NSAID type of medicine. First, a short introductory passage on the nature of side effects was added. Second and more importantly, we changed the frequency descriptors (FDs) for the side effects. A preliminary study had shown that the frequencies associated with common Dutch FDs are much higher than the writers of leaflets mean to convey. In the main study, we replaced the original FDs ...

This study examines the way side effects information is presented in patient information leaflets. In a field experiment, we tested the effects of two attempts to improve a side effects paragraph in a leaflet about a NSAID type of medicine. First, a short introductory passage on the nature of side effects was added. Second and more importantly, we changed the frequency descriptors (FDs) for the side effects. A preliminary study had shown that the frequencies associated with common Dutch FDs are much higher than the writers of leaflets mean to convey. In the main study, we replaced the original FDs ...

Communications of treatment risk, such as medication package inserts, commonly report total rates of adverse reactions (e.g., 4% get heartburn with placebo, 9% with medication). This approach, however, requires mental arithmetic to distinguish the incremental risk caused by medication (here, 5%) from the total post-treatment risk. In two Internet-administered survey experiments (N ¼ 2,012 and 1,393), we tested whether explicitly reporting the incremental risk and framing it as the ‘‘additional risk’’ of complications influenced people’s impressions of adverse event risks. Study 1 compared side-by-side displays of total risks against sequential presentations that highlighted the incremental risk, using both ...

Communications of treatment risk, such as medication package inserts, commonly report total rates of adverse reactions (e.g., 4% get heartburn with placebo, 9% with medication). This approach, however, requires mental arithmetic to distinguish the incremental risk caused by medication (here, 5%) from the total post-treatment risk. In two Internet-administered survey experiments (N ¼ 2,012 and 1,393), we tested whether explicitly reporting the incremental risk and framing it as the ‘‘additional risk’’ of complications influenced people’s impressions of adverse event risks. Study 1 compared side-by-side displays of total risks against sequential presentations that highlighted the incremental risk, using both ...