ABSTRACT
Roughly one in four medication errors reported in the U. S. involve confusion between drug names that look or sound too much alike (e.g., ‘vinblastine’ and ‘vincristine’). One possible solution to this problem is to change the appearance of the names on packaging. For instance, Cohen (1999) suggested that it is much easier to differentiate ‘DOBUTamine’ and ‘DOPamine’ than ‘dobutamine’ and ‘dopamine’. The FDA Name Differentiation Project (in the U.S.) implemented this idea in 2001. Manufacturers were encouraged to produce labelling that visually differentiated the established names with the use of ‘Tall Man’ (capital) letters and perhaps also colour. The current studies investigate the effects that this proposed intervention has on making names less confusable perceptually (Experiments 1 and 2), and in memory (Experiment 3).
