Miller (1956)

‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two’

AIM: Miller's aim was to investigate the capacity of Short-Term Memory (STM).

METHOD: He conducted a literature review of studies published between the 1930s to 1950s, investigating perception and STM.

RESULTS: The review suggested that organizing stimulus input into a series of chunks enabled STM to cope with about seven chunks of information. This is why more than seven digits, words, or musical notes could be remembered successfully, if the information is chunked. For instance, when trying to remember a phone number, which has 11 digits, we chunk the information into groups, such as 0767, 819, 45, and 34, so we only need to remember four chunks of information instead of 11 individual digits.

CONCLUSION:Organising information into chunks can extend the capacity of STM and enable more information to be stored.