The present study examined age differences in the sources of information that older and younger adults use when making decisions about purchasing over-the-counter (OTC) cold/allergy medications. Participants completed a questionnaire addressing information sources that influence OTC purchases and advertising awareness. The questionnaire was given either before or after completing a decision task in which they searched a computerized display of label information and chose one of seven brand name medications to purchase. Analyses revealed age-related differences in sources of information considered and label information used when purchasing OTC medications. Priming participants to recall specific advertising claims using the questionnaire had little effect on the information used by younger or older adults. Younger adults relied on price and product use information, whereas older adults relied on side effect and drug interaction information. This finding has implications for OTC label design and health care professionals who counsel patients about OTC medication usage. When consumers decide to purchase over-the-counter medications (OTCs), they often are perplexed because there are hundreds of products from which to choose. For example, more than 10 years ago there were over 800 OTCs available to treat symptoms of the common cold (Lowenstein & Parrino, 1987), and undoubtedly today there are more. Little is known about what factors are important to consumers as they make a decision about purchasing OTCs. Identifying these factors may be particularly important to

Because older adults are more discerning about potential product usability problems, they may be particularly valuable as research participants in early-stage design research (prior to the availability of working prototypes).

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Are the naive usability judgments of blind consumers more accurate than those of consumers without such impairments? Forty-one legally blind participants evaluated three user-product interfaces for three different products.The interface designs varied in terms of stimulus-response (s-r) compatibility and were associated with empirically-determined differences in accuracy, learnability, or response speed. Compared to the naive judgments collected by Payne (1995) from sighted participants, blind judges were reliably more accurate in their predictions of the relative performance efficiency of the various designs.We speculate that the superior judgments of blind participants may be due to their use of haptic and auditory evaluation strategies.In a follow-up study, normally-sighted participants were asked to evaluate the same products using either visual or nonvisual strategies. Judgments were most accurate, and similar to that of blind judges, when sighted judges performed the task nonvisually.

Personality traits and musical preferences were obtained and analyzed using the IPIP Five Factor Inventory from Buchanan (2001) and questions regarding preferred musical characteristics similar to those used in a study by Schwartz (2004). The goal was to see if certain types of people (in regard to personality) prefer certain types of music. In addition, Sensation Seeking as defined by Zuckerman (1979) was used as another facet of personality and as a second independent variable. There were 170 students surveyed. Significant main effects were found for Sensation Seeking and Openness to experience, meaning that participants higher in these characteristics tended to prefer harder forms of music.