Abstract
One of the top causes of adverse drug effects is the mislabeling and misreading of instructions or warnings on medical labels. In addition to miscomprehension of these labels, label information may be missed or seen incorrectly due to a lack of sufficient attention and visual processing. Currently, there is little consistency in prescription medical labels across providers, with warning labels containing either icons, text, or a combination of both. The present study examined how the design configuration of iconography and text on medical labels influences attention to specific label elements. A flicker task was used in two experiments in which a set of medical labels were presented on a display. Participants were required to detect and identify changes in a label’s icon, text, or both. Overall, the results indicate that viewers tend to focus attention on icons rather than text, and that label information is more likely to be missed on labels containing both icon and text information compared to labels with a single type of information. We discuss how change detection in the current study relates to design considerations for prescription medical warning labels.
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Miles, J., Brown, K., Nguyen, M. (2022). Attention to Medical Warning Labels Using the Flicker Paradigm. In: Yamamoto, S., Mori, H. (eds) Human Interface and the Management of Information: Visual and Information Design. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13305. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06424-1_17
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