Dealing with numbers is an inherent aspect of interpreting health statistics, and negative emotions may interfere with medical decision making. One emotionally charged decision-making context is parents making medical decisions for their children. Knowing which factors--such as anxiety specific to math contexts--are associated with parents'…

Comparing health risks that include ratios of integers (e.g., 12 in 1,000) is challenging. We tested whether a worked-example intervention with number-line visual displays improved adults' risk-comparison accuracy, whether pretest confidence moderated learning, and which individual differences related to accuracy. Replicating prior work, U.S.…

Health risks, when presented as ratios (e.g., two out of seven people), are challenging to understand, but visual displays can foster accurate understanding. We conducted three experiments to test how characteristics of numbers (Experiment 1), icon arrays (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), and number lines (Experiments 1 and 3) influenced people's ability…