Allan
Paivio 1941 -
Dual Coding Theory
Biography
Ph.D. McGill University
Professor Emeritus at University of Western Ontario
Allan Paivio earned three degrees from McGill University
between 1949 and 1959. Paivio has a Ph.D. in Psychology,
and has spent over forty years in research on imagery,
memory, language, cognition, and other areas. He has
published approximately two hundred articles and book
chapters, and five books. His last book, Imagery and Text:
A Dual Coding Theory of Reading and Writing, he wrote with
Mark Sadoski.
Although, Allan Paivio is retired Emeritus Professor from
the University of Western Ontario he still has his old
office there and goes in most days of the week. He is an
occasional consultant for a private remedial education
company in California called Lindamood-Bell Learning
Processes (located all over the U.S.).
During his undergraduate years, Allan Paivio entered into
the bodybuilder's physique contest, somewhat along the
lines of Mr. Universe. The Weiders (huge in body building
equipment, magazines, and nutritional supplements)
sponsored him in the competition. Allan gained the title of
MR. CANADA in 1948, and was on the cover of Muscle Power
and Your Physique. He still works out regularly and enjoys
playing golf and snooker.
Theory
"Dual coding" implies that verbal and non-verbal systems
are alternative internal representations of events. For
example, one can think of a house by thinking of the word
"house", or by forming a mental image of a house The verbal
and image systems are connected and related, for one can
think of the mental image of the house and then describe it
in words, or read or listen to words and then form a mental
image.
Verbal system units are called logogens; these units
contain information that underlie our use of the word.
Non-Verbal system units are called imagens. Imagens contain
information that generates mental images such as natural
objects, holistic parts of objects, and natural grouping of
objects. Imagens operate synchronously or in parallel; thus
all parts of an image are available at once. Logogens
operate sequentially, words come one at a time in a
syntactically appropriate sequence in a sentence. The two
codes may overlap in the processing of information but
greater emphasis is on one or the other. The verbal and
non-verbal systems are further divided into subsystems that
process information from different modalities.
Learning Theory
Bibliography
Paivio, A. (1986).
Ryu, J. et al (2000)
