A preliminary experiment was conducted to investigate a cognitive processing explanation for prescription drug noncompliance among older adults. The experimental construct tested was that the dynamic underlying the misinterpretation of many medicine directives is directly related to the number of mental operations that each format requires in order to answer a specific question about dosage information. Reaction times and error rates were found to follow a pattern of results which supports the hypotheses for both older and younger adults. Increasing the number of mental operations was found to be most detrimental to the performance of adults age 75 years and older.
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