Question

Is this about memory capacity, or really about chunking?

DOdortiz· 7 days ago

The '7±2' number is what everyone remembers, but Miller's deeper point seems to be about chunking — that capacity is measured in chunks, not raw items, so what counts as a 'unit' is doing the work. How should we read the famous number today: a hard limit, or an artifact of how the units were defined?

Cognitive Science

1 Reply

Accepted answer

TBtbecker7 days ago

Later work (e.g., Cowan) argued the real limit is closer to ~4 chunks once you control for rehearsal and chunking. So the '7' is partly an upper bound inflated by recoding. The chunking insight aged much better than the specific number.