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"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" is a 1956 paper by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller. In it Miller showed a number of remarkable coincidences between the channel capacity of a number of human cognitive and perceptual tasks. In each case, the effective channel capacity is equivalent to between 5 and 9 equally-weighted error-less choices: on average, about 2.5 bits of information. [citation needed] Miller hypothesized that these may all be due to some common but unknown underlying mechanism. Image File history File links Please see the file description page for further information. ...
In cognitive psychology and mnemonics, chunking refers to a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information. ...
Cognitive Psychology is the school of psychology that examines internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language. ...
George A. Miller (born February 3 1920) is a famous professor of psychology at Princeton University, whose most famous work was The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information, which was published in 1956 in In the linguistics community, Miller is well...
Channel capacity, is the amount of discrete information that can be reliably transmitted over a channel. ...
This article is about the unit of information. ...
The ASCII codes for the word Wikipedia represented in binary, the numeral system most commonly used for encoding computer information. ...
Working memory capacity
Working memory is generally considered to have limited capacity. The earliest quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term memory was the magical number seven introduced by Miller (1956)[1]. He noticed that the memory span of young adults was around seven elements, called chunks, regardless whether the elements were digits, letters, words, or other units. Later research revealed that span does depend on the category of chunks used (e.g., span is around seven for digits, around six for letters, and around 5 for words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For instance, span is lower for long than for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud, and on the lexical status of the contents (i.e., whether the contents are words known to the person or not)[2]. Several other factors also affect a person's measured span, and therefore it is difficult to pin down the capacity of short-term or working memory to a number of chunks. Nonetheless, Cowan (2001)[3] has proposed that working memory has a capacity of about four chunks in young adults (and less in children and old adults). Chunking may have several meanings: In cognitive psychology and in memory training systems, chunking refers to a short-term memory mechanism and techniques to exploit it. ...
Software engineering related Ed Yourdon in his Modern Structured Analysis (Prentice Hall, 1979; now available as the Structured Analysis Wiki) specified that the maximum number of subroutines that should be called from the main program should be between 5 and 9. This heuristic was not proposed as being due to any computer limit; rather, it was suggested that the programmer becomes confused when trying to understand the program. Edward Yourdon is a computer consultant, author, and lecturer and a recognised pioneer in a software engineering methodology - structured programming. ...
In computer science, a subroutine (function, method, procedure, or subprogram) is a portion of code within a larger program, which performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code. ...
Look up Heuristic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Other cognitive numeric limits The concept of a limit is illustrated by imagining the patterns on the faces of a die (see dice). It is easy for many people to visualise each of the six faces. Now imagine seven dots, eight dots, nine dots, ten dots, and so on. At some point it becomes impossible to visualise the dots as a single pattern (a process known as subitizing), and one thinks of, say, eight as two groups of four. The upper limit of your visualisation of a number represented as dots is your subsisting limit for that exercise. Two standard six-sided pipped dice with rounded corners. ...
Introduction Kaufman et al. ...
The film Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman, portrayed an autistic savant, who was able to visualise the number represented by an entire box of toothpicks spilled on the floor. A similar feat was clinically observed by neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks and reported in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Therefore one might suppose that this limit is an arbitrary limit imposed by our cognition rather than necessarily being a physical limit. Rain Man is a 1988 film which tells the story of a selfish yuppie who discovers that his father has left all of his estate to the autistic brother he never knew he had. ...
This does not cite its references or sources. ...
An autistic savant (historically described as idiot savant) is an autistic person with Savant Syndrome[1]. Savant Syndrome is described as having both a severe developmental or mental handicap and extraordinary mental abilities not found in most people. ...
Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology and neurology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relate to specific psychological processes. ...
Oliver Sacks Oliver Wolf Sacks (born July 9, 1933, London) is a neurologist who has written popular books about his patients. ...
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing the case histories of some of Dr. Sackss patients. ...
Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Hrair from Watership Down and applications within programming Hrair is a number too large to count. This term is from the fictional language Lapine used in Richard Adams's Watership Down. In this novel, a rabbit's hrair is greater than 4 whereas, for humans, hrair would be greater than 7 plus or minus 2. From a psychological perspective, hrair is the point where the person is overwhelmed by concepts or change. The interesting thing about a person reaching their hrair point is that we are not only unable to understand the new concept or stimulus when it is introduced, but it makes us unable to continue as effectively with what we were doing before. The term hrair limit as used by Ed Yourdon in his Modern Structured Analysis (Prentice Hall, 1979) is the maximum number of subroutines that should be called from the main program, again set at between 5 and 9. This heuristic was not proposed as being due to any computer limit; rather, it was suggested that the programmer becomes confused when trying to understand the program. Lapine is an artificial language constructed by Richard Adams and spoken by the fictional rabbits of his novel Watership Down. ...
Richard George Adams (born May 9, 1920 in Newbury, Berkshire, England) is a British novelist who is best known for two novels with animal characters, Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. ...
For other uses, see Watership Down (disambiguation). ...
Edward Yourdon is a computer consultant, author, and lecturer and a recognised pioneer in a software engineering methodology - structured programming. ...
In computer science, a subroutine (function, method, procedure, or subprogram) is a portion of code within a larger program, which performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code. ...
Look up Heuristic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
In organisation theory the limit has a similar meaning: the maximum number of projects that one can be involved in simultaneously before chaos starts to ensue. Organizational studies, organizational behavior, and organizational theory are related terms for the academic study of organizations, examining them using the methods of economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology. ...
Urban legends surrounding 7±2 A number of urban legends have grown up around the number 7±2 and human performance on various cognitive tasks. While Miller's paper is most often cited, by coincidence research into short term memory also threw up a 7±2 finding which seems to have added impetus to the claims made. Urban Legend is also the name of a 1998 movie. ...
Cognitive The scientific study of how people obtain, retrieve, store and manipulate information. ...
Short-term memory, sometimes referred to as primary or active memory, is that part of memory which stores a limited amount of information for a limited amount of time (roughly 30-45 seconds). ...
As outlined above, Miller's paper simply pointed out that channel capacity on various tasks was around 2.5 bits of information. Measurements of human short term memory capacity also found a 7±2 limit. However, this limit was eventually found to be a result of using subjects who were speakers of English to remember sequences of single digits. It turns out that one component of human working memory, the phonological loop, is capable of holding around 2 seconds of sound. Two seconds is the duration of the English spoken form of 7±2 digits (in Chinese it is around 9 and in Welsh around 6), the variation is highly correlated with the rate at which people speak. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
Working Memory is a theoretical framework within cognitive psychology that refers to the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information. ...
Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...
Welsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. ...
The 7±2 urban legends are various rules specifying the maximum number of items that can occur in a given context (eg, in software engineering the maximum number of subroutines that should be called from the main program). Whether these 7±2 rules provide the benefits claimed of them can be verified only by experiments. However, neither Miller's paper nor the early short term memory research is likely to provide the primary experimental evidence needed to back up such claims. Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software. ...
In computer science, a subroutine (function, method, procedure, or subprogram) is a portion of code within a larger program, which performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code. ...
References - George A. Miller. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
See also In ergonomics, Fitts law is a model of human movement, predicting the time required to rapidly move from a starting position to a final target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. ...
Hicks law, or the Hick-Hyman law, is a human-computer interaction model that describes the time it takes for a user to make a decision as a function of the possible choices he or she has. ...
Introduction Kaufman et al. ...
Working Memory is a theoretical framework within cognitive psychology that refers to the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information. ...
In cognitive psychology and mnemonics, chunking refers to a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information. ...
External links - George A. Miller. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
- Another online version of the same paper
- In-depth discussion on many myths around Miller's paper at Edward Tufte's site.
- The 7±2 Urban Legend (pdf file)
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