Miller - The magical number seven, plus or minus two

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158

• We’re limited by a finite Span of absolute judgment
  • Which we can think of information-theoretically: Channel capacity of humans as information processors
  • Human channel capacity increases with stimulus dimensionality
• We also have a finite Span of working memory
  • The critical observation: Working memory span is mostly independent of item complexity
  • Coined in this paper: “Chunks” in human cognition
• Implication of the critical observation: Human channel capacity increases with bits-per-chunk
  • Early experiment reported in this paper: Recoding can increase chunk size
• Learning increasingly complex ideas may amount to forming larger effective chunk sizes