The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information

George A. Miller

Immediate memory span is limited to about seven items regardless of how much information each one carries, because people expand capacity by recoding input into larger chunks rather than storing it raw.

Read it

Where it is now wrong

The famous number did not hold. Working-memory capacity is now put nearer four chunks than seven, and Miller's own paper is markedly more sceptical about the figure than the fifty years of citation that followed it.

Before you start

Assumes: no psychology; the experiments are described in enough detail to follow cold

Groundwork for

Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.

Working MemoryAlan Baddeley, 1992Replaces a single short-term store with a multi-component system - a central executive coordinating a phonological loop and a visuospatial sketchpad - each independently damageable and each with its own capacity limit.

Filed under Cognitive Psychology in Psychology.