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Using visuals to enhance learning

Published on August 31, 2026   9 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
My name is Dr. Cynthia Nebel. I'm the Director of Learning Services at St. Louis University School of Medicine. This video is about using visuals to enhance learning.
0:13
Cognitive psychologists refer to this idea of using visual and verbal information together as dual coding. It means that we are literally coding information in our brains in two different ways. There are many different types of dual coding. This can include things like infographics, diagrams, timelines, and graphic organizers, even cartoon strips or sometimes just drawing your own picture in order to better understand the verbal information that you're given in class.
0:54
In order to show you the power of dual coding, let's do a couple of little examples. Let's say I was trying to learn that the word antiar, which is an Old English word that means poison. What I would do is try to come up with a picture that links those two words together. Maybe I'm going to picture an ant, and I need to connect that ant with poison. So maybe what I'm going to do is picture that ant clutching his throat, because he's just drunk some poison. The idea is, later on, I'm going to see the word antiar and a picture is going to pop in my mind of an ant clutching his throat. And I might sit there and go, "Why is that ant clutching his throat? Oh, right. He's been poisoned. The answer is poison". So that picture connects those two words or those two concepts together, allowing the verbal information to have a visual component to it.

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Using visuals to enhance learning

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