Sponsor: Richard Huskey, Ph.D. Communication Strategic messages are often developed to inform the public about important individual- and society-level health information. Narratives are commonly used to achieve this ambition. Narratives are presumed to be effective due their relative ease of processing and promotion of states which induce focused attention on story content. Surprisingly, however, few studies have systematically investigated what public health information people remember from a narrative, or why they remember it. Using signal detection measures, we discovered that people had better sensitivity (A') for health information in narratives that required less cognitive load to process. In our study, this meant that participants had better recognition memory for health messages that used simpler language rather than more complex language. Interestingly, language difficulty did not influence participant response bias (B"). One important goal of narrative health messages is to increase health knowledge, particularly in contexts where diseases are new, rare, or affect a certain group. Many of these efforts have relied on heuristics for what makes a "good" narrative where "good" is defined in terms of engagement or entertainment. Our study helps align the ambitions of narrative health messages (audience knowledge increase) with practical tips for accomplishing this ambition (use simpler language). A Study of Shock Layers in Viscous Flows

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