Reference
George A. Miller
The limited capacity of short-term memory, and chunking as the way around it, come from his 1956 paper.
Miller's The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two is one of the most cited papers in psychology and one of the most frequently misquoted. The lasting contribution is not the number. It is the observation that the limit applies to chunks rather than to items, and that what counts as one chunk depends entirely on what you already know.
That is why a digit span score is slippery, and why someone who recognises a string of numbers as a date remembers it as one thing while everyone else remembers it as four.
Referenced work
- The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two (Psychological Review, 1956) reference
Elsewhere
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