Magic Number 7? 3 chunks of 3

Revisited Wed 3/26/08

The magic number seven after fifteen years, George Miller

Found reference, on p. 107 in section "5.2 Subjects - Why", to the three chunks of three in ...

Object Oriented Analysis (2nd Edition) (Paperback)
by Peter Coad (Author), Edward Yourdon (Author)

Amazon

Donald Broadbent
http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/donald_broadbent.html

[PDF]

Chunks in expert memory: Evidence for the magical number four… or ...

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
The magic number seven after fifteen years. In A. Kennedy. & A. Wilkes (eds.), Studies in long-term memory. Wiley. (pp. 3-18). Charness, N. (1976). ...
www.brunel.ac.uk/3518/PDF//GobetClarkson.pdf - Similar pages - Note this

UI Design Web Article

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/sep00.asp

Even though the field has systematically moved from Miller's "immediate memory," to "short-term memory," and currently to "working memory," many practitioners are still back in the 1950s. Even Miller's original "seven" has been shown to be untrue. For example, Broadbent (1975) suggested that the working memory capacity was actually 4-6 items, MacGregor (1987) reported that it was only four items, and LeCompte (1999) argued that it was actually about three items.

References

Baddeley, A. (1992), Working memory, Science, 255, 556-559.

Broadbent, D.E. (1975), The magic number seven after fifteen years. In A. Kennedy and A. Wilkes (eds.), Studies in Long-Term Memory, New York: Wiley, 3-18.

Brown, J. (1958), Some tests of the decay theory of immediate memory, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 10, 12-21.

LeCompte, D. (1999), Seven, plus or minus two, is too much to bear: Three (or fewer) is the real magic number, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 289-292.

MacGregor, J.N. (1987), Short-term memory capacity: Limitation or optimization? Psychological Review, 94(1), 107-108.

Miller, G.A. (1956), The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information, The Psychological Review, 81-97.

Peterson, L.R. and Peterson, M.J. (1959), Short-term retention of individual items, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 193-198.

--
Tom