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The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. " The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information " [1] is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. [2][3][4] It was written by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Harvard University 's Department of Psychology and published in ...
The observation, also by George A. Miller, that the number of objects the average person can hold in working memory is about seven. [4] It was put forward in a 1956 edition of Psychological Review in a paper titled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two". [5] [6] [7]
In an early and influential article, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", [25] Miller suggested that human short-term memory has a forward memory span of approximately seven plus or minus two items and that that was well known at the time (apparently originating with Wundt). Later research reported that this "magical number seven" is ...
From the days of William James, psychologists had distinguished short-term from long-term memory. While short-term memory seemed to be limited, its limits were not known. In 1956, Miller put a number on that limit in the paper "The magical number seven, plus or minus two".
George Armitage Miller discovered the short-term memory can only hold 7 (plus or minus two) things at once. [4] The information here is also stored for only 15–20 seconds. The information stored in the short-term memory can be committed to the long-term memory store. There is no limit to the information stored in the long-term memory.
Thus, instead of remembering 10 separate digits that are beyond the putative "seven plus-or-minus two" memory span, we are remembering four groups of numbers. [8] An entire chunk can also be remembered simply by storing the beginnings of a chunk in the working memory, resulting in the long-term memory recovering the remainder of the chunk. [4]
In 1956, George Armitage Miller wrote his paper on how short-term memory is limited to seven items, plus-or-minus two, called The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. This number was appended when studies done on chunking revealed that seven, plus or minus two could also refer to seven "packets of information".
George A. Miller suggested that the capacity of the short-term memory storage is about seven items plus or minus two, also known as the magic number 7, [2] but this number has been shown to be subject to numerous variability, including the size, similarity, and other properties of the chunks. [3]