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Challenging Dual-Coding Theory
Dr Wilma Bainbridge, University of Chicago
Which would you remember tomorrow: a drawing of a key, or the word “key”?
On average, people remember pictures better than words. Researchers call it the picture superiority effect. The usual explanation, dual-coding theory, says a picture is stored twice, as an image and as a word, which gives you two ways back to it.
If that’s right, people with aphantasia shouldn’t remember pictures any better than words. Do they?
What the study found
Dr Wilma Bainbridge and her colleagues tested it in “Challenging dual-coding theory: Picture superiority effects persist in aphantasia”, published in the journal Neuropsychologia in 2026.
In all, 131 adults took part online: 62 with aphantasia and 69 typical imagers. Some were recruited through our email list.
They saw lists of line drawings, familiar symbols such as $, and written names of things, two seconds each, then typed every item they could recall. No one saw both the picture and the name of the same thing.
Both groups remembered pictures better than names, by about the same margin. Both also remembered symbols better than their names.
The typical imagers remembered more overall, but the groups clearly differed only on pictures, where people with aphantasia recalled fewer.
One pattern showed up only in aphantasia: people with aphantasia remembered symbols better than pictures, while typical imagers remembered the two equally well.
The authors conclude that seeing an image in the mind isn’t needed for the picture advantage, which challenges dual-coding theory. They think a simpler idea fits better: pictures and symbols stand out more than words, in how they look and what they mean.
Their conclusions assume the aphantasia group truly had little or no imagery. And these are group results, so they can’t tell you how any one person remembers.
What you’ll take away
- Why pictures beat words in memory, with or without a mind’s eye
- What dual-coding theory claims, and where this study leaves it
- The pattern only the aphantasia group showed: symbols remembered better than pictures
About Wilma
Dr Wilma Bainbridge is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, where she leads the Brain Bridge Lab. She studies perception and memory: why some things are easier to remember than others, and how the brain picks up on that.