THEORY: Magical Number Seven Plus Or Minus Two

The paper being talked about here is:

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our
Capacity for Processing Information
by George A. Miller

http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html


Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

dunn patrick w wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, David T Shoda wrote:
>
> > ***People are only able to handle 7 (+2 or -2) bits of information at a
> > time.  Is anyone here more familiar with this 'bit' of information, or
> > information theory in general?
> >
>
> I'm a bit familiar with the theory, having participated in an experiment
> based on it.  Apparently, this:
>
> xkfp
>
> Is four "bits" of information.  However, this:
>
> dogs
>
> Is only one.  Hence, we remember the order of planets not by remembering
> nine units in a row (incidently, this applies particularly to short term
> memory rather than long term memory), but as a single unit, a sentence:
> "My very educated mother just baked us nine pies."
>
> That's why I tend to suspect that we remember words as words, not as
> collections of phonemes.  Of course, this would be very easy to discover
> through experimentation.  Having a gap of thirty seconds between phonemes,
> for instance.
>