Browsing by Author "Douglas J. Gillan, Committee Member"

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    Assessing the Between- and Within-Person Relationships between Pain and Cognitive Performance in Older Adults
    (2009-08-07) Weatherbee, Sarah Rose; Thomas M. Hess, Committee Member; Shevaun D. Neupert, Committee Member; Douglas J. Gillan, Committee Member; Jason C. Allaire, Committee Chair
    The current study was part of a larger study where overarching purpose was to design a daily measure of everyday cognitive performance. The current investigation examined the extent to which self-report pain was related to cognitive performance in a sample of 148 community dwelling older adults (M = 73 years old, SD = 6.84). A multidimensional battery was used to assess socio-demographics, physical health (e.g. self-report pain, self-report physical health), mental health (e.g. negative affect, life-event stress, and daily stress), and cognitive functioning (e.g. short-term memory, processing speed, inductive reasoning, and working memory) at pretest and over 8 occasions. The direct relationship between self-report pain and cognition was examined as well as potential moderators and mediators of the pain-cognition relationship both at the between- and within-person levels. At the between-person level, self-reported pain was found to be significantly related to processing speed, where high pain was associated with slower reaction time. At the within-person level self-reported pain was found to be significantly related to working memory, where on days when self-reported pain was higher than an individual’s average, their working memory performance suffered. Within-person self-reported pain X age interactions were found for short-term memory, processing speed, and working memory. Additionally, negative affect and stress were found to moderate the pain-cognition relationship. The strength of the pain-cognition relationship is best understood by examining moderating factors such as age, stress, and negative affect. Furthermore, the handful of significant interactions at the within-person level suggest that the pain-cognition relationship is dynamic and should not be assessed at only one time point.
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    Eye Movements Between Text and Warnings in Product Owner's Manuals
    (2009-04-23) Cowley, Jennifer Antonia; Michael S. Wogalter, Committee Co-Chair; Eric N. Wiebe, Committee Co-Chair; Douglas J. Gillan, Committee Member
    This research examines some design features that may increase noticeability, readership and recall of warnings within the text of product owner’s manuals. Variables manipulated were warning saliency (e.g., low or high saliency), the physical placement of warnings in text (e.g., embedded versus separate), and text-directed cueing (e.g., low versus high salient cueing) in a fractional factorial design. Warnings were made salient by adding signal word panel color, alert symbol icons, bulleted text and black borders. Low salient warnings lacked those features and the warning was given in paragraph prose-style text. Two conditions, a non-eye tracked and an eye-tracked, underwent similar procedures to assess reading and recall of the warning information. Six groups comprised the non-eye tracked sample: each group viewed a unique condition with a unique combination of warning features. The eye-tracked sample viewed 2 opposing conditions with warning feature combinations that comprised a low and high salient condition. While there were no significant group differences in warning information recall accuracy in the non-eye tracked samples, the low salient conditions in the eye-tracked samples had higher recall accuracy than the high salient conditions. Also, the high salient conditions with high salient cues, significantly shifted visual attention to cued warnings more often than the low salient conditions with low salient cues. However, the eye-tracked sample failed to show significance differences for noticing and reading between low and high salient conditions. In addition, the assessment of the first three fixations indicated that participants may initially scan page contents before reading onset at the top left corner of the page, however fixation locations were not influenced by warning locations. Future research directions and study implications are addressed.