Enhancing Comprehension and Retention of Safety-Related Pictorials

Abstract

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 the test 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 verbal label)—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 many people.