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The authors explored knowledge effects on comprehension of multimedia health information by older adults (age 60 or older). Participants viewed passages about hypertension, with text accompanied by relevant and irrelevant pictures, and then answered questions about the passage. Fixations on text and pictures were measured by eye-tracking. Participants with more knowledge of hypertension understood the passages better. This advantage was related to how they processed the passages: while knowledge differences were unrelated to overall time viewing displays, relationships between allocation and knowledge emerged when the data were partitioned into phases (during and after first reading the text). More knowledgeable participants ...

Eye tracking methodology has been a major empirical research ap-proach for the study of online comprehension processes in reading and scene viewing. The use of eye tracking methodology for the study of diagrammatic representations, however, has been relatively limited so far. The investigation of specific types of diagrammatic representations, such as statistical graphs is even scarce. In this study, we propose eye tracking as an empirical research approach for a systematic analysis of multimodal comprehension of line graphs. Based on a framework of multimodal comprehension of graphs and texts, which focuses on the role of spatial concepts, we present an ...

With rising rates of prescription drug abuse and associated overdose deaths, there is great interest in having accurate and efficient screening tools that identify nonmedical use of prescription drugs in health care settings. The authors sought to gain a better understanding of how patients interpret questions about misuse of prescription drugs, with the goal of improving the accuracy and acceptability of instruments intended for use in primary care. METHODS: A total of 27 English-speaking adult patients were recruited from an urban safety net primary care clinic to complete a cognitive interview about a 4-item screening questionnaire for tobacco, alcohol, illicit ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether hyphens that disambiguate phrasing in ambiguous sentences influence reading rate and reading comprehension for younger and older adults. Moreover, as working memory (WM) has been implicated in age-related changes in sentence comprehension for both auditory and written materials, we asked if it contributed to comprehension of our sentences with hyphenated and non-hyphenated ambiguous noun phrases (NPs), predicting that the hyphens would reduce WM load. Twenty younger (M = 24 years) and 20 older (M = 73 years) adults read sentences with either ambiguous or non-ambiguous NPs that were either hyphenated or ...

This study explored the dimensionality of multiple-text comprehension strategies in a sample of 216 Norwegian education undergraduates who read seven separate texts on a science topic and immediately afterwards responded to a self-report inventory focusing on strategic multiple-text processing in that specific task context. Two dimensions were identified through factor analysis: one concerning the accumulation of pieces of information from the different texts and one concerning cross-text elaboration. In a subsample of 71 students who were also administered measures of intratextual and intertextual comprehension after responding to the strategy inventory, hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that self-reported accumulation of information ...

Accumulating evidence shows that certain hazard combinations interact to present synergistic risks. However, little is known about the most effective ways of helping individuals to understand this complex risk concept. More specifically, there is an absence of empirical research that has assessed the relative efficacy of messages that explain either the causal mechanism and/or the probabilistic components of synergistic risks. In an experiment designed to address this issue, we presented participants with messages concerning the synergistic risk of developing esophageal cancer for individuals who consume both tobacco and alcohol. Relative to a control group, we compared the extent to which ...

Two experiments examined readers’ memory for information sources in short news stories. Based on current theories of text comprehension, we assumed that sources involved in the situation described (e.g. a witness or a participant) would be better remembered than remote sources (e.g. someone commenting on the topic from a distance). We additionally tested the assumption that less plausible stories would enhance readers’ memory for remote information sources. Experiment 1 found that readers remembered sources involved in the situation better than remote sources. Although sources of less plausible stories were not better remembered than sources of more plausible stories, implausible details ...

Two experiments examined readers’ memory for information sources in short news stories. Based on current theories of text comprehension, we assumed that sources involved in the situation described (e.g. a witness or a participant) would be better remembered than remote sources (e.g. someone commenting on the topic from a distance). We additionally tested the assumption that less plausible stories would enhance readers’ memory for remote information sources. Experiment 1 found that readers remembered sources involved in the situation better than remote sources. Although sources of less plausible stories were not better remembered than sources of more plausible stories, implausible details ...

It is well known that people with aphasia have sentence comprehension impairments. The present study investigated whether lexical factors contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in both the auditory and written modalities using on-line measures of sentence processing. People with aphasia and non-brain-damaged controls participated in the experiment (n=8 per group). Twenty-one sentence pairs containing high and low frequency words were presented in self-paced listening and reading tasks. The sentences were syntactically simple and differed only in the critical words. The dependent variables were response times for critical segments of the sentence and accuracy on the comprehension questions. The results showed ...

A controversial issue in anaphoric processing has been whether processing preferences of anaphoric expressions are affected by the antecedent's grammatical role or surface position. Using eye tracking, Experiment 1 examined the comprehension of pronouns during reading, which revealed shorter reading times in the pronoun region and later regions when the antecedent was the subject than when it was the prepositional object. There was no effect of antecedent position. Experiment 2 showed that the choice between pronouns and repeated names during language production is also primarily affected by the antecedent's grammatical role. Experiment 3 examined the comprehension of repeated names, showing ...