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In the typical demonstration of dual coding, a list consisting of an equal number of pictures and words is presented to study participants. On encountering an item in the list, the study participant is asked to read the word or name the picture. Later, when the items are recalled, twice as many pictures than words are recalled. This picture-superiority effect, or the better recall of pictures over words, can be attributed to dual coding, which is the activation of traces in visual and verbal memory systems. While the verbal system is dedicated to processing of linguistic information, such as words and sentences, which are represented as discrete units or “logogens” and processed sequentially, the visual or imagistic system is dedicated to the processing of images, which are processed more holistically and represented through units referred to as “imagens” ( Paivio 2006 ). The complementary role of two distinct, but interconnected, visual and verbal systems is at the heart of dual coding theory (DCT). According to DCT, pictures benefit from dual activation. First, the visual system has to interpret or decode the picture. Second, the verbal system has to generate a verbal label for the picture that has been activated in the visual system. Because the systems are interconnected, the activations are pooled, thus enhancing memory for the pictures. The pooling of activations from the ... log in or subscribe to read full text