Recently there has been increasing interest in enabling conswners to more easily acquire information from over-the-counter (OTC) nonprescription pharmaceutical labels. An age-related decline in recall was observed, with older adults recalling far less infonnation than undergraduates or younger adults. 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. Results demonstrated that insuuctions from the fully redundant text and pictorials format were recalled more often than instructions from the other formats. Following exposure to one of the instruction sheets, participants were given a free: recall test on the content of the medication information. 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). 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. Nonverbal symbols such as pictorials are increasingly being recommended and used to convey warnings and other safety-related infonnation. Additionally, it can serve as a handy reference guide that could be useful to government regulators, industry managers, consumer product organizations, industrial hygienists, marketers, researchers, expert witnesses, and attorneys who need guidance on warnings.
We believe this review will be useful to human factors designers and consultants who produce and evaluate warnings. The summaries reflect our current knowledge on the factors that influence warning effectiveness. Although we do not explicitly give design recommendations, these studies contain implicit design guidelines. A broad overview of research findings is presented in 24 alphabetized sections. This article reviews and summarizes data from more than 150 laboratory and field studies published mainly in the last 15 years and mostly in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (HFES). Guidelines for warning design no longer need to be based on expert opinion they can now be supported by the results of empirical research. We have learned a great deal about the factors that influence safety-related information processing and behavior. Over the last decade and a half, a tremendous volume of research has accumulated in the area of warnings and risk perception.
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