When you give a friend directions only in words, “go past the convenience store and turn right,” they soon forget, but if you sketch them a simple map, they remember it for a long time. In a vocabulary book, a word like “apple” is easy to memorize, while words like “justice” or “concept” keep slipping out of your head. The explanation that words and pictures are stored in the mind along different paths is called Dual Coding Theory.
Put simply, Dual Coding Theory is the idea that “the human mind has a verbal system that handles words and a separate nonverbal system that handles images, and when the two systems are linked, we understand better and remember longer.” If you attach two tags, one in words and one in pictures, to the same content, you can recover it through one even if you lose the other.
In this piece we will look in turn at the meaning and origins of Dual Coding Theory, how the two systems connect, easy examples from the classroom and everyday life, and finally how to apply it in teaching and some common misconceptions.
The Structure and Uses of Dual Coding Theory
What Is Dual Coding Theory?
The theory was set out systematically by Allan Paivio, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, in his 1971 book Imagery and Verbal Processes. He paid attention to experimental findings that concrete words you can picture, such as “dog” or “house,” are remembered far better than abstract words such as “truth” or “possibility.” After repeated experiments from the 1960s onward in which people memorized pairs of words, he confirmed that concreteness is one of the most powerful factors governing memory.
Paivio’s answer was this: a concrete word calls up not only a verbal code made of sounds and letters but also a nonverbal code, a picture in the mind, whereas an abstract word relies mainly on the verbal code alone. Because the cues for memory are left along two separate paths, recall becomes easier as well. In 1991, together with James M. Clark, he developed the theory into a framework for explaining education as a whole.
- Verbal System: the system that handles information in the form of language, such as words, sentences, and speech, one piece after another.
- Nonverbal System: the system that handles non-linguistic information, such as shapes, scenes, sounds, and touch, all at once.
Representations and Connections Linking the Two Systems
Paivio also gave names to the basic units stored in each system. The unit of the verbal system is the “logogen,” and the unit of the nonverbal system is the “imagen.” He held that logogens are organized by associations and hierarchies, while imagens are organized by part-to-whole relationships.
(1) Representational processing
This is the most direct stage: seeing the written word “apple” brings that word itself to mind, and seeing a photo of an apple brings its shape to mind.
(2) Referential processing
This is the stage of seeing the word “apple” and picturing a red, round apple, or seeing a picture of an apple and saying its name. It is the bridge by which the two systems call each other up, and the more such connections there are, the firmer the memory becomes.
(3) Associative processing
This is the stage in which related representations come to mind one after another within the same system, as “apple” leads on to “fruit,” “autumn,” and “peel.”
- Logogen: a word-level representation stored in the verbal system.
- Imagen: an image-level representation stored in the nonverbal system.
Understanding Dual Coding Through Easy Examples
Dual coding can be met more often in classrooms and daily life than in the laboratory.
(1) Vocabulary cards with pictures
Putting a picture of an object next to a foreign word makes it stay in memory longer than a card with only the spelling. The phenomenon of remembering the same thing better when you see it as a picture than as a word is called the “picture superiority effect,” and Paivio explained it through dual coding.
(2) Cycle diagrams in science class
If you read about the water cycle only in text, the stages get jumbled, but when you look at it alongside a diagram drawn with arrows, the order of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation becomes clear at a glance. This is because the verbal explanation and the spatial layout hold each other in place.
(3) The memory palace
The old memory technique of imagining placing each item of a list to be memorized in a different spot in a familiar house works on the same principle. It deliberately creates a nonverbal code by attaching a vivid scene to each word.
How to Apply It in Teaching, and Common Misconceptions
This idea carried over into the multimedia learning theory of educational psychologist Richard E. Mayer. A prime example is the “multimedia principle,” which holds that people learn more deeply from words and pictures together than from words alone. However, each channel has a limit on how much it can process at once, so filling the screen with exactly the same sentences as the narration can actually get in the way of learning.
There is also a common misconception. Dual coding is not a learning-styles claim that “visual learners should get only pictures and auditory learners only words.” It means giving every learner words and pictures together, in a way that they mesh with each other. Decorative pictures do not help; a picture works only when it is directly connected to the content.
In actual lessons, methods such as grouping key concepts into a concept map, placing the order of events on a timeline, and having students summarize an explanation in their own drawings after hearing it are often used. When showing a picture, it is also important to place the related explanation close to it so that the eyes do not have to shuttle back and forth between two places.
- Multimedia Principle: the principle that people learn more deeply from words and pictures together than from words alone.
- Picture Superiority Effect: the phenomenon of remembering the same thing better when it is seen as a picture than as a word.
Dual Coding Theory sees memory not as a single line of record but as a web where two paths, words and pictures, meet. Simply drawing what you are studying yourself, or putting a picture into words, adds one more bridge between the two systems.
Adding a picture to the words you have memorized, and drawing the pictures you have seen back out into words: that is the first step toward learning that lasts.
