The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" is one of the most cited papers in psychology. It was published in 1956 by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller at Princeton University in Psychological Review. It is often interpreted as claiming that the number of objects an average human can store in working memory is 7 ± 2. It is also often called Miller's law.
Miller's Law
This is the law from a paper published by cognitive psychologist George Miller in 1956, stating that "the amount a person can remember at one time is around 7 items." Miller argued that the number of pieces of information that can be held in working memory — the memory briefly kept in mind while performing a task — is limited to 5–9. Later experiments revealed that there is no exact magic number, but this clearly shows the importance of chunking meaning. A representative example is the way we memorize phone numbers by breaking them into chunks. This memory technique, which existed even before Miller's research, is called chunking.
Counterarguments
According to Susan M. Weinschenk's 100 Facts About People, Miller's research was wrong (Alan Baddeley, 1994). According to newer research (Baddeley 1996, Nelson Cowan 2001), it is 4, not 7. According to Cowan, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, working memory in young people generally has a capacity limit of 3–5.
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