Morrow, D., Carver, L. M., Leirer, V. O., & Tanke, E. D. (2000). Medication schemas and memory for automated telephone messages. Human Factors, 42(4), 523-540.

Morrow, D.; Carver, L.; Leirer, V.; Tanke, E.

2000

Morrow, D., Carver, L. M., Leirer, V. O., & Tanke, E. D. (2000). Medication schemas and memory for automated telephone messages. Human Factors, 42(4), 523-540.

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The present study investigated whether older and younger adults use a schema to organize and remember spoken reminder messages for taking medication. Previous research has shown that older and younger adults share preferences for organizing printed instructions for taking medication, suggesting a shared schema. Older and younger participants in Experiment 1 of the present study used a similar schema to organize medication reminder messages. This finding suggests that the medication schema generalizes across communication purpose (to remind or to instruct) as well as across patient age. Medication reminder messages were better understood and remembered when organized to match this schema, whether the reminders were presented as automated telephone messages (Experiment 2) or in printed form (Experiment 3). Schema-compatible organization especially helped people draw inferences from the messages, suggesting that organization helps older and younger adults construct a situation model of the medication-taking task from the messages. Potential applications of organized messages include increasing the impact of automated systems for delivering health services.

In Experiment 3 we found that schema organization improves memory for printed as well as spoken medication reminder messages. Notably, the question time findings in both Experiments 2 and 3 suggest that organization especially helps participants draw inferences from medication messages. Although organization primarily improved only older adults’ inference time in Experiment 2, it improved younger as well as older adults’ inference time in Experiment 3.

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