Short Term Memory
As George Miller's article stated, humans can retain five to nine pieces of information in their short term memory. The amount of information increases when placed in chunks, which allows short term memory to store about four "chunks." The short term memory processes and stores information for about twenty to thirty seconds. After this, information is either committed to long term memory, or lost all together. Chunking is a way to increase the capacity of short term memory.
Read more about this topic: Chunking (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the words short, term and/or memory:
“Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knolwedge, Grammatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”
—John Hersey (b. 1914)