Biomedical subjects

Ruth Filik

Publications and source records attributed to Ruth Filik.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Labeling of medicines and patient safety: evaluating methods of reducing drug name confusion.

OBJECTIVE: We report three experiments evaluating the proposal that highlighting sections of drug names using uppercase ("tall man") lettering and/or color may reduce the confusability of similar drug names. BACKGROUND: Medication errors commonly involve drug names that look or sound alike. One potential method of reducing these errors is to highlight sections of names on labels in order to emphasize the differences between similar products. METHOD: In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were timed as they decided whether similar name pairs were the same name or two different names. Experiment 3 was a recognition memory task. RESULTS: Results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that highlighting sections of words using tall man lettering can make similar names easier to distinguish if participants are aware that this is the purpose of the intervention. Results from Experiment 3 suggested that tall man lettering and/or color does not make names less confusable in memory but that tall man letters may increase attention. CONCLUSION: These findings offer some support for the use of tall man letters in order to reduce errors caused by confusion between drug products with look-alike names. APPLICATION: The use of tall man letters could be applied in a variety of visual presentations of drug names--for example, by manufacturers on packaging, labeling, and computer software, and in pharmacies on shelf labels. Additionally, this paper demonstrates two meaningful behavioral measures that can be used during product design to objectively assess confusability of packaging and labeling.

England↗

PubMed2004

Drug name confusion: evaluating the effectiveness of capital ("Tall Man") letters using eye movement data.

Medication errors commonly involve confusion between drug names that look or sound alike. One possible method of reducing these errors is to print sections of the names in "Tall Man" (capital) letters, in order to emphasise differences between similar products. This paper reports an eye-tracking experiment that evaluates this strategy. Participants had their eye movements monitored while they searched for a target product amongst an array of product packs. The target pack was replaced by a similar distractor in the array. Participants made fewer errors when the appearance of the names had been altered, that is, they were less likely to incorrectly identify a distractor as the target drug. This result was reflected in the eye movement data.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Processing doubly quantified sentences: evidence from eye movements.

We investigated the processing of doubly quantified sentences, such as KeUy showed a photo to every critic, that are ambiguous as to whether the indefinite (a photo) specifies single or multiple referents. Ambiguity resolution requires the computation of relative quantifier scope: Whether a or every takes wide scope, thereby determining how many entities or events are to be represented. In an eye-tracking experiment, we manipulated quantifier order and whether continuations were singular or plural, for constructions with the direct or the indirect object occurring first. We obtained effects consistent with the on-line processing of relative scope at the doubly quantified phrase and considered two possible explanations for a preference for singular continuations to the quantified sentence. We conclude that relative quantifier scope is computed on line during reading but may not be a prerequisite for the resolution of definite anaphors, unless required by secondary tasks.

Eye Movements↗

PubMed2003

Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles.

We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6-7 years, 8-10 years, 11-12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.

Adult↗