The present study investigated whether older and younger adults use a schema to organize and remember spoken reminder messages for taking medication. Previous research has shown that older and younger adults share preferences for organizing printed instructions for taking medication, suggesting a shared schema. Older and younger participants in Experiment 1 of the present study used a similar schema to organize medication reminder messages. This finding suggests that the medication schema generalizes across communication purpose (to remind or to instruct) as well as across patient age. Medication reminder messages were better understood and remembered when organized to match this schema, whether the reminders were presented as automated telephone messages (Experiment 2) or in printed form (Experiment 3). Schema-compatible organization especially helped people draw inferences from the messages, suggesting that organization helps older and younger adults construct a situation model of the medication-taking task from the messages. Potential applications of organized messages include increasing the impact of automated systems for delivering health services002E
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Daniel Morrorw is a research associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire. He received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982.
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Lisa M. Carver is a research assistant in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire. She received a B.A. in communication from Stonehill College in North Easton, MA, in 1991.
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Von O. Leirer is director of Decision Systems. He received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of California at Santa Bardara in 1980.
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Elizabeth Decker Tanke is director of Applied Decision Research. She received a Ph.D. in social psychology in 1976 from the University of Minnesota.
