Allan Paivio

Allan Paivio (1925 to 2016) was a Canadian psychologist and professor at the University of Western Ontario, best known for dual-coding theory. He was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, the son of a Finnish Canadian journalist and poet. Before his academic career he was a competitive bodybuilder who won the title of Mr. Canada in 1948, and he earned a degree in physical education at McGill University in 1949. He later took his Ph.D. in psychology at McGill in 1959 and taught at Western from 1963 until his retirement. Over more than forty years he studied imagery, memory, language and cognition, publishing about two hundred articles and five books, among them Imagery and Verbal Processes and Mental Representations. Dual-coding theory holds that verbal and nonverbal information are processed and stored in separate but connected systems, and it has influenced research on memory, reading and the design of learning materials. He served as president of the Canadian Psychological Association in 1975.