Allan Paivio

Allan Urho Paivio (March 29, 1925 – June 19, 2016) was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario and former bodybuilder.

[2][3] Paivio was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario as the son of Aku Päiviö and Ida Hänninen.

In 1948, Allan Paivio won the title of "Mr. Canada" in a competition established by the International Federation of BodyBuilders.

[5] In a 1948 article in the YOUR PHYSIQUE magazine, Pavio is described as a well known athlete, bodybuilder, gymnast and physical culturist.

Dual-coding theory posits that nonverbal and verbal information are stored separately in long term memory.

Paivio's work has implications in many areas including human factors, interface design, as well as the development of educational materials.

Paivio obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology, and spent over forty years in research on imagery, memory, language, cognition, and other areas.

[8] His 2000 book, Imagery and Text: A Dual Coding Theory of Reading and Writing, he wrote with Mark Sadoski.

He published his most recent book in 2006, Mind and Its Evolution: A Dual Coding Theoretical Approach.

The dual coding theory (DCT), according to Paivio, suggests that visual and verbal information act as two distinctive systems.

The verbal and non-verbal systems are further divided into subsystems that process information from different modalities.

One hypothesis is that nonverbal and verbal codes, being functionally independent, can have additive effects on recall.

For example, participants in free recall experiments are likely to name presented objects covertly and thus create a nonverbal (pictorial) and a verbal memory trace.

New York: Oxford University Press Ryu,J., Lai,t., Colaric, S., Cawley,J., & Aldag, H. (2000).