The Picture Superiority Effect Isn’t About Pictures: Why Gym Marketing Photos Stopped Working

Kate Higdon, Ian Neath, Aimée Surprenant and Tyler Ensor at Memorial University set out to test a textbook claim that has sat in psychology textbooks since 1971. The picture-superiority effect says pictures are remembered better than words. Allan Paivio’s dual-coding theory supplied the explanation: pictures get encoded both visually and verbally, which leaves the brain two routes back to them at recall. The research team had reasons to doubt that explanation. Another account, going back decades in the memory literature, says pictures win for a different reason. They are more physically distinctive than words, and the brain stores distinctive items better than blended ones. Understanding the relevance of the Picture Superiority Effect is key to following these alternative explanations.

To separate those two explanations, Higdon and colleagues ran a cleaner test. In their version of the task, half the words appeared in standard black print. The other half appeared in varied fonts, sizes, colours and capitalisation. The pictures were all presented in plain black and white. If dual coding was right, the pictures should still be remembered better, because the double encoding is a property of the picture itself. A distinctiveness account predicted the opposite. In the new condition, where the words were the more visually varied items on the list, the picture advantage should collapse. Across old/new recognition, forced-choice recognition, associative recognition and free recall, the effect known as picture superiority was eliminated. This happened when the words were made distinctive and the pictures were not. The authors, writing in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, conclude that dual coding is no longer a viable explanation of picture superiority. An effect that has carried Paivio’s name for fifty years appears to be a distinctiveness effect wearing the wrong label.

The fitness industry spends heavily on visual production. Photography, video, filters, brand guides and social feeds absorb a large share of most gym marketing budgets. The working assumption under all of it is that imagery does the work of holding attention and recall thanks in part to the Picture Superiority Effect. Nobody in the industry typically invokes Paivio or memory research when they commission a shoot. They don’t need to. The intuition that a good photograph carries more weight than a paragraph of text is general in marketing, gym or otherwise. What Higdon’s result does is make that intuition conditional in a way it hasn’t been before.

Scrolling a random cross-section of gym accounts, the first observation most people make is how similar the feeds look: the same shots of people lifting, the same transformation diptychs, the same golden-hour tones. The specific photograph differs across accounts; the visual grammar rarely does. This convergence is not unusual in saturated categories. The photography of plated food and made beds converges on the same style within each industry. This happens because successful references become templates and templates harden into category defaults. Gym photography has travelled the same road. Sometimes it forgets the core lesson of the Picture Superiority Effect: distinctiveness matters.

Higdon’s study measures memory under controlled conditions. It does not measure whether someone buys a gym membership or whether a prospect is more likely to book a trial after seeing a transformation photo. Those questions are outside the paper’s scope, and nothing in the experimental design was set up to answer them. What the study offers is a mechanism: memory advantages for one class of stimulus depend on how distinctive that class is relative to the rest of the set. Inside a lab, that takes the form of varied fonts on words and uniform colouring on pictures. Outside one, the same principle would suggest that distinctiveness depends on whatever else the viewer has just seen—echoing the foundational implications of the Picture Superiority Effect.

Within a category that has converged on a shared visual language, any single image inside that language becomes harder to distinguish from its neighbours. A gym homepage running the same visual grammar as the rest of its suburb doesn’t stop being a picture, but it stops being a distinctive one relative to its competitive set. Whether that matters for conversion is a separate empirical question. Higdon didn’t answer it and neither can this post. What Higdon’s result does suggest is that memory of any single image in a field of near-duplicates is weaker than most people assume. The claim of the Picture Superiority Effect is challenged whenever image distinctiveness is lacking. An image that could have served as a memorable landmark in a less saturated category now sits inside a collective visual average.

A photograph of a deadlift on a gym website competes first against the other photographs of a deadlift the viewer encountered on the way to it. Memory research, especially studies on the Picture Superiority Effect, has something precise to say about that particular contest, and the verdict is older than the dual-coding theory it just displaced.

References

1. Higdon, K. F., Neath, I., Surprenant, A. M., & Ensor, T. M. (2025). Distinctiveness, not dual coding, explains the picture-superiority effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218241235520

2. Ensor, T. M., Surprenant, A. M., & Neath, I. (2019). Increasing word distinctiveness eliminates the picture superiority effect in recognition: Evidence for the physical-distinctiveness account. Memory & Cognition, 47(1), 182–193. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-018-0858-9

If this changes how you think about your gym’s visual output, we should talk. The Picture Superiority Effect may have wider implications for your brand.