Enhancing comprehension and retention of safety-related pictorials

James A. Scoggins Department of Psychology Nonh Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695-7801 Because of their relatively universal information transmission potential, pictorials have been suggested as a common means of safety communications across heterogeneous groups of users and uses. The present study used a training paradigm designed to enhance comprehension and retention of pharmaceutical and industrial-safety pictorials. Manipulated were time of testing (prior to training, immediately following training, and after a one-week delay), content of instruction (supplying the associated verbal label vs. the verbal label plus an extra explanatory statement), and difficulty level ("easy" vs. "difficult" to understand pictorials according to comprehension rates in earlier studies). Using an incomplete factorial mixed-model design experiment, the results showed substantial training effects. There was little change in scores between the test immediately after training and thetest after a one-week delay (and the final test scores did not differ between participants who took or did not take the immediate post-training test). Easy pictorials were comprehended (both initially and following training) better than difficult pictorials, although the latter showed the most dramatic increase in understandability after training. Additionally, the instruction content manipulation (adding the explanatory statement to the verballabel}-which had been expected to influence the degree of encoding-had no effect on retention. The substantial gains in understanding the more difficult pictorials suggest that brief training, as little as giving the pictorial's verbal meaning once, can have a large impact in facilitating comprehension for pictorials that would otherwise not be understood by manypeople. INIRODUCTION Warnings, risk communications, and operating instructions increasingly use pictorials to convey safety- related information (Laux, Mayer, and Thompson, 1989; Young and Wogalter, 1990). Most warnings guidelines and standards (e.g., ANSI, 1991; FMC, 1985; Westinghouse, 1981) recommend that warnings include descriptive pictorials. Pictorials are increasingly used in consumer products ranging from pharmaceuticals to high-tech vehicles, photographic, and home entertainment equipment. They also appear in professional contexts ranging from health to industrial machinery. Concern for user diversity as related to language and comprehension abilities is also increasing. In part, this interest is derived from multi-national marketing approaches, changes in life styles and usage patterns, and increasingly complex features of modem life. Pictorials are potentially useful ways to convey safety information, but only if they are accurately comprehended and understanding is maintained over time. Several studies (e.g., Collins, Learner, and Pierman, 1982; Laux, Mayer, and Thompson, 1989; Wolff and Wogalter, 1993) have shown that some pictorials in use today are not well understood. The problem is that while pictorials can be developed for some concepts that people will readily understand (mainly for concrete ideas), there are other concepts (mainly of abstract ideas, e.g., passage of time, radiation, biohazards, etc.) for which many people will not understand when pictorially depicted. Indeed, some concepts may never be adequately communicated via simple pictorials.