The influence of pictorials on the comprehension and recall of pharmaceutical safety and warning information

Nonverbal symbols such as pictorials are increasingly being recommended and used to convey warnings and other safety-related infonnation. Although fully redundant text and pictorial messages often facilitate performance, it is unknown what may result when textual instructions are accompanied by an incomplete set of pictorials, in which each and every textual item is not supplemented by an accompanying pictorial. To evaluate the practice of communicating information using various pictorial and text formats, fictitious yet realistic -appearing medication instruction sheets were created that presented eight dosing instructions in the following fonnats : Text alone , pictorials alone, fully redundant text and pictorials, text with four instructions accompanied by pictorials (incomple te pictorials) , and no instructions (control) . Following exposure to one of the instruc tion sheets, partici- pants were given a free: recall test on the content of the medication information. Results demonstrated that insuuctions from the fully redundant text and pictorials format were recalled more often than instructions from the other formats . Also, the fully redundant text and pictorials format was given higher ratings than the other formats, whereas the pictorials alone and control fonnats received the lowest ratings. An age -related decline in recall was observed, with older adults recalling far less infonnation than undergraduates or younger adults.