Medication schemas and memory for automated telephone messages

The present study investigated whether older and younger adults use a schem a 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 sh ared 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 communicatio n purpose (to remind or to instruct) as well as across patient age. Medicat ion reminder messages were better understood and remembered when organized to match this schema, whether the reminders were presented as automated tel ephone messages (Experiment 2) or in printed form (Experiment 3). Schema-co mpatible organization especially helped people draw inferences from the mes sages, suggesting that organization helps older and younger adults construc t a situation model of the medication-taking task from the messages. Potent ial applications of organized messages include increasing the impact of aut omated systems for delivering health services.