Allan Paivio

Allan Paivio was a Canadian psychologist who spent most of his career at the University of Western Ontario, where he developed dual-coding theory, the account of memory holding that the mind processes verbal and nonverbal information through two distinct, interacting channels. He earned three degrees, including a PhD in psychology in 1959, from McGill University, and set out the theory across roughly two hundred articles and five books, most notably Imagery and Verbal Processes in 1971 and Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach in 1986. He served as president of the Canadian Psychological Association in 1975. Before his academic career he was also a competitive bodybuilder, winning the Mr. Canada title in 1948.