George Miller's 1956 paper reviewed experiments on three seemingly unrelated tasks, immediate memory span for a list of items, absolute judgment of where a single stimulus falls on one dimension, and span of attention for counting a briefly seen group, and found the same rough capacity limit, about seven items, recurring across all three.
Facts
Key FindingThe span of immediate memory seems to be almost independent of the number of bits per chunk, at least over the range that has been examined to date, showing short-term memory holds a roughly constant number of meaningful chunks of information rather than a fixed amount of raw data, a limit usually summarized as about seven items, plus or minus two. 1 Method
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Miller's magical number seven experiments are the founding demonstration of chunking's effect on memory span.
Miller's finding of a roughly seven-item span of immediate memory is the working-memory-capacity limit cognitive load theory builds its own premise on.
Source Classics in the History of Psychology: Miller (1956)
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1. Classics in the History of Psychology: Miller (1956)
Classics in the History of Psychology (York University)Summary section
By organizing the stimulus input simultaneously into several dimensions and successively into a sequence of chunks, we manage to break (or at least stretch) this informational bottleneck.
Associated With: Cognitive Load Theory, Paper body, the discussion of the span of immediate memory's independence from chunk size
The span of immediate memory seems to be almost independent of the number of bits per chunk, at least over the range that has been examined to date.
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