Allan Paivio’s research while affiliated with Western University and other places

In the education of deaf learners, from primary school to postsecondary settings, it frequently is suggested that deaf students are visual learners. That assumption appears to be based on the visual nature of signed languages—used by some but not all deaf individuals—and the fact that with greater hearing losses, deaf students will rely relatively more on vision than audition. However, the questions of whether individuals with hearing loss are more likely to be visual learners than verbal learners or more likely than hearing peers to be visual learners have not been empirically explored. Several recent studies, in fact, have indicated that hearing learners typically perform as well or better than deaf learners on a variety of visual-spatial tasks. The present study used two standardized instruments to examine learning styles among college deaf students who primarily rely on sign language or spoken language and their hearing peers. The visual-verbal dimension was of particular interest. Consistent with recent indirect findings, results indicated that deaf students are no more likely than hearing students to be visual learners and are no stronger in their visual skills and habits than their verbal skills and habits, nor are deaf students’ visual orientations associated with sign language skills. The results clearly have specific implications for the educating of deaf learners.

The distinction between verbal and nonverbal cognitive abilities has been a defining feature of psychometric theories of intelligence for the past century. Despite their popularity, however, these theories have not included functional connections between verbal and nonverbal systems that are necessary if they are to explain performance in intellectual tasks involving interactions between language and nonverbal knowledge. This functional gap limits the capacity of psychometric theories to explain and predict fundamental aspects of individual differences in cognitive abilities that have long been studied experimentally. This article summarizes the history, nature, and possible causes of the problem, and then concludes with a neuroscientifically-enhanced, multimodal dual coding approach to intelligence that focuses on the synergistic interactivity of verbal and nonverbal systems.

Paired-associate learning of lists composed of “specific” and “general” nouns as both stimuli and responses was facilitated by stimulus but not response specificity. Specific nouns were rated superior to general nouns in their capacity to evoke sensory images, and stimulus imagery correlated positively with number of associates correctly recalled. Meaningfulness was insignificantly related to specificity and learning. The findings are discussed in terms of the theory that imagery can mediate verbal associations.

This book updates the Dual Coding Theory of mind (DCT), a theory of modern human cognition consisting of separate but interconnected nonverbal and verbal systems. Allan Paivio, a leading scholar in cognitive psychology, presents this masterwork as new findings in psychological research on memory, thought, language, and other core areas have flourished, as have pioneering developments in the cognitive neurosciences. Mind and Its Evolution provides a thorough exploration into how these adaptive nonverbal and verbal systems might have evolved, as well as a careful comparison of DCT with contrasting "single-code" cognitive theories.

This chapter updates the dual coding theory (DCT) of the memory systems of bilingual (and multilingual) individuals. DCT is a particular variant of multiple storage views of memory that contrast with common coding (single store) views. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2014. All rights are reserved.

Concrete and abstract nouns differing in rated capacity to evoke imagery served as the common elements in a stimulus equivalence mediation paradigm. The mediation test items were nonsense syllables. Significant mediation effects were obtained in 2 experiments o Relative to control Ss, the concrete mediation group was superior to the abstract in rate of learning over mediation test trials, but not in total learning scores. Any influence of nonverbal (imaginal) mediation was apparently overshadowed by verbal chaining.

A previous study showed that pupillary dilation is associated with attempts to generate mental images to stimulus words, image arousal being indicated by a key press. The present study revealed similar but attenuated dilation effects when the key press response was eliminated, The difference can be interpreted in terms of motivational effects of task difficulty, or arousal effects associated directly with the motor response.

Two experiments examined larger and smaller judgments of animal and object word pairs. In the pilot experiment, we used the standard tachistoscopic paradigm; in the second experiment, we employed a modified pencil-and-paper version. Congruity effects (i.e., comparative × relative magnitude interactions) were consistently larger with animal than with object stimuli across subjects ranging from second graders to university students. These results support a semantic priming interpretation of the congruity effect and emphasize the need to consider the retrieval component as well as the comparison stage in symbolic judgments.

Pupillary responses (PR) and galvanic skin responses (GSR) were continuously monitored while Ss attempted to generate images suggested by both concrete and abstract words. Ss were required to press a key when an image occurred or at the end of the “image” period if they were unable to generate an image. The results showed a significant difference between concrete and abstract nouns with regard to pupil size, time to maximum pupil size, time to maximum GSR, and key-press latency. These results suggest that the pupillary response, especially its latency, may be a more sensitive peripheral response than GSR during cognitive tasks.

Word imagery (I), frequency (F), and meaningfulness (m) were independently varied in different lists, and the effect of each investigated in the Brown-Peterson STM paradigm. Consistent with previous findings, overall correct recall was much better for high-I words (66%) than for low-I words (39%). Conversely, low-F words were recalled significantly better than high-F words (65% vs 43%). The effect of m was not significant. Although performance declined generally over trials, there was no evidence of any differential PI buildup for words that were high and ones that were low on any given attribute. Alternative interpretations were discussed.