Mark W. Becker - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Obesity is associated with increased mortality, morbidity, and increased health care costs. Curbing the obesity epidemic by altering people's food choices would have substantial health and economic benefit. It has long been believed that one way to promote healthy eating is to provide consumers with nutritional information in the form of a nutrition facts panel (NFP) displayed on product packaging. Research on the effectiveness of this approach suggests that the traditional NFP labels are effective in promoting healthy food choices when people process the information, but that too few people attend to, encode and understand the information presented in traditional NFP labels. In an attempt to increase the positive impact of nutritional labeling, there has been a push to adopt front of panel (FOP) nutritional labels. These FOP labels present information about a few key nutrients on the front of the package, or Principle Display Panel, and include a combination of small text, icon, and/or color systems that are designed to quickly capture the attention of the consumer. Although this approach is intuitively appealing, there is little objective, experimental support validating that FOP labels result in more attention to and processing of nutritional information. Additionally, the format for presenting information in these FOPs has not been based on basic research about attention and cognitive processing. Our proposal applies basic research on visual cognition to the design of a novel FOP format that is optimized to capture attention and will require few cognitive resources to encode, comprehend, and use. Empirical methods traditionally used in basic research on attention and visual cognition (e.g., eye-tracking, change detection, and incidental memory tasks) are used to evaluate how well different FOP designs attract attention to nutritional information, induce encoding of information into memory, and facilitate rapid, cross-product nutritional comparisons. Optimizing the delivery format in this way should produce a label that successfully communicates nutritional information to a greater segment of the population, thereby empowering more people to make healthful dietary decisions, ultimately reducing obesity rates. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposal applies basic research on visual attention and cognition to the design and evaluation of effective techniques for presenting nutritional information on food packages. An optimal label will attract attention to itself and communicate substantial nutritional information with little cognitive effort. A label that effectively accomplishes these goals will empower people to make more healthy dietary decisions, thereby reducing obesity rates.

Project Summary/Abstract Over-the-counter medicines (OTCs) provide many benefits, including increased access, independence, flexibility and affordability. Despite their advantages, OTCs carry risks of having an Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) such as those caused by drug-drug interactions or drug- diagnosis interactions. The risk of ADRs due to OTC uses is particularly pronounced in older consumers, who tend to consume more OTCs and have higher rates of polypharmacy than other age groups. While OTC labels are required to contain critical information (e.g., active ingredients and warnings) designed to minimize ADRs, evidence suggests that a lack of engagement with key information on OTC labels is endemic and problematic, particularly among older consumers. This proposal leverages research on nutrition, medical device and prescription labels and applies basic research in visual cognition to develop and objectively evaluate the ability of varied OTC label designs to attract attention to critical information, thereby promoting appropriate decision making in older adults. Specifically, it addresses whether adopting a warning label that places information that is critical for avoiding ADRs on the front panel of the packaging increases attention to these warnings and supports better decision making. It also evaluates whether color highlighting of this critical information improves attention and decision making. Finally, investigate the possibility that adopting these techniques could have the potential negative consequence of making people less likely to attend to the more comprehensive warning information that appears in the traditional drugs fact panel. To evaluate these issues the proposal applies empirical methods from basic research on attention and visual cognition (e.g., eye-tracking, change detection, and visual search tasks) to investigate how well different OTC label designs attract attention to critical information, promote decision making, and facilitate rapid, cross-product comparisons. Using this information to optimize delivery format should produce a label that successfully communicates critical drug information to at-risk older consumers, thereby empowering them to make healthful medication decisions, ultimately reducing ADR rates. Finally, this research has implications for regulatory policy related to label design.