Summary: People often remember visuals better than words. Designers can leverage the picture-superiority effect to make their products memorable and learnable.
You may have heard the popular saying: a picture is worth a thousand words . Pictures can communicate concepts better than words alone, partly because people tend to remember information better when presented visually. This is known as the picture-superiority effect.
What Is the Picture-Superiority Effect?
Definition : The picture-superiority effect refers to the fact that people tend to remember pictures better than words.
This phenomenon is well documented in cognitive psychology. One of the most popular theories for why pictures are more memorable than words belongs to the psychologist Allan Paivio. Paivo believed that the picture-superiority effect occurs because any visual is stored in two ways in memory — (1) as an image, and (2) as a word or phrase that describes the image. In contrast, words are stored in only one way — the word itself. While the mind can generate images for words, this process is not automatic and requires significant cognitive effort, making it less common.