From Mental to Visual Image: An Iterative Method for Designing Pictograms to Promote the Understanding of a Drug Treatment

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-25-1_18How to use a DOI?

Keywords

“Mental images”; “Pictograms”; “Medicine”; “At-risk populations”

Abstract

Taking medication requires several precautions. The use of pictograms, when accompanying prescribed pharmacotherapy, is considered as an effective way to facilitate the understanding of sensitive populations (e.g., Older people, low literacy levels, migrants, etc.) regarding their pharmaceutical treatment. However, the prerequisite is to provide a set of pictograms which is easily recognized by medicine users. This supposes that those health visual tools should be designed in accordance with the users’ visual representations of a given pharmaceutical information. To test the identification of pictograms designed from mental images, we conducted two studies. In the first study, fifty-two participants were asked to draw their mental images associated with information contained in medication leaflets. The corpus of drawings conducted to the design of pictograms that were then submitted to a comprehension test among a new population (N = 116) in a second study. It appears that the most frequent mental images are those that are best identified once they have been transcribed in the form of pictograms.

These findings, which corroborate the link between mental and visual images, invite to consider the use of pictograms to promote understanding of drug treatment on the one hand, and to integrate drug users in the process of designing pictograms on the other.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Golda Cohen
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/10
TI  - From Mental to Visual Image: An Iterative Method for Designing Pictograms to Promote the Understanding of a Drug Treatment
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on International Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities (CISOC 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 171
EP  - 180
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-25-1_18
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-25-1_18
ID  - Cohen2022
ER  -