Pavio distinguishes between verbal and non-verbal information as a basis for dual-coding theory–an important concept for educators designing and developing learning media. The distinction between these categories is clear to me, but during a class discussion today it seemed I was in the minority. This is in part surely due to the fact that other researchers and writers sometimes refer to visual and non-visual, and even Pavio himself seems to equate verbal and non-verbal to “logogens” and “imagens”. (There also seems to be a prejudice against “verbal” including written text, but I maintain that’s merely confusion.)
In order to put cognitive load theory into practice I think a clear distinction between both verbal and non-verbal as well as visual and non-visual is important. The following diagram is my first attempt to clarify these fairly simple distinctions:
