Conclusion
comprehension and recall of medical information, comprehension and recall
MINOR
People differ in which kind of representation of statistical information they understand best: Some people understand graphical representations better, others are better off with mere numbers. Yet assessing their abilities to understand graphical and numerical information is infeasible in practice. Giving patients the opportunity to decide which representation to receive could have been a very efficient way to provide those information representations to patients that fit their abilities and thus improve comprehension and recall. However, despite some very minor benefits for verbatim knowledge, overall this approach is not sufficient to improve comprehension and recall of medical information. Instead, people seem to choose the representation they perceive as more attractive. Thus, improving knowledge by getting the right representation to the right people would require other methods of tailoring rather than choice, yet those would need to be feasible in practice. As graphical representations were rated as being more attractive and are preferred by a majority, there is another solution to improve knowledge that requires further work, however: to develop better graphical representations that are so clearly designed that they are understandable for broader audiences—including for those with low graph literacy. Important steps in that direction include adding numerical and textual information to graphs that simply describes what can be seen, which has been shown to improve performance and reduce the impact of numeracy,