Chunking (Psychology)

In cognitive psychology, chunking is the process by which small individual pieces of a set of information are bound together into a meaningful whole in memory, a grouping meant to improve short-term retention by bypassing the limited capacity of working memory. A chunk is a collection of basic units strongly associated with one another that have been grouped together and stored in a person's memory, retrievable as a unit because of that coherent grouping, and because chunks rely on an individual's own perceptions and past experience, their size and shape can be highly subjective, though it generally runs from two to six items and varies further by language and culture. The phenomenon is easily observed in the way people group numbers in daily life, as when a string of digits such as 12101946 is broken into 12, 10 and 1946 and remembered as a date, December 10, 1946, rather than as eight separate digits, a pattern the psychologist George Miller linked to a working-memory span of about seven items, plus or minus two.