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"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" [1] is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. [2] [3] [4] It was written by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Harvard University's Department of Psychology and published in 1956 in Psychological Review.
That presentation, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two", was later published as a paper which went on to be a legendary one in cognitive psychology. [4] Miller moved back to Harvard as a tenured associate professor in 1955 and became a full professor in 1958, expanding his research into how language affects human cognition. [4]
George Armitage Miller discovered the short-term memory can only hold 7 (plus or minus two) things at once. [4] The information here is also stored for only 15–20 seconds. The information stored in the short-term memory can be committed to the long-term memory store. There is no limit to the information stored in the long-term memory.
George A. Miller suggested that the capacity of the short-term memory storage is about seven items plus or minus two, also known as the magic number 7, [2] but this number has been shown to be subject to numerous variability, including the size, similarity, and other properties of the chunks. [3]
The digit-span test is a perfect example of a measurement for classically defined short-term memory. Essentially, if one is not able to encode the 7 plus or minus two items within a few minutes by finding an existing association for the information to be transferred into long-term memory, then the information is lost and never encoded. [22]
In an early and influential article, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", [26] Miller suggested that human short-term memory has a forward memory span of approximately seven plus or minus two items and that that was well known at the time (apparently originating with Wundt). Later research reported that this "magical number seven" is ...
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The plus–minus sign or plus-or-minus sign (±) and the complementary minus-or-plus sign (∓) are symbols with broadly similar multiple meanings. In mathematics, the ± sign generally indicates a choice of exactly two possible values, one of which is obtained through addition and the other through subtraction.