![]() Stated otherwise, how well chunking works depends on what a person already knows. This recoding strategy, of course, only works if appropriate knowledge is available. For example, remembering France as one chunk for the color sequence blue, white, red costs much less storage capacity than actually remembering blue, white, red. He assumes that they combine small units of information into larger and more meaningful units. One topic of Miller’s (1956) paper is how people manage to hold much more information in working memory than their restricted capacity would usually allow them to. A common application of this working memory function in daily life is when people silently repeat a telephone number in order to dial it immediately. Humans can only hold a very restricted amount of information active in mind, or more specifically in working memory 1. ![]() Accordingly, the final sentence of his article reads: “Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all these sevens, but I suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence.” As things turned out, Miller’s efforts to prevent misinterpretation of his paper were in vain it would be interesting to know what might have happened if he had not omitted the quotation marks around “magical”. Possibly having foreseen the misinterpretation of his “magical” number, Miller (1956) repeatedly cautions not to take this rhetorical device seriously. Additionally, Miller (1989) later clarified that he had employed the seven only as a rhetorical device to tie together two otherwise apparently unrelated topics of his research (cf. Those who have actually read Miller’s (1956) article know that he did surely not promote any magical number (but the idea of recoding in order to chunk information as briefly introduced below). Although the here discussed insights are not as magically applicable as some would like, the present overview might be of use for the interested UI designer. I here give a brief overview of some aspects of research on cognitive capacity limitations from a basic experimental psychological perspective. As every myth, there is also some truth to the “magical number seven”. Generations of designers were forced to limit, for example, steps in a workflow, tabs, items in dropdown lists, links, choices, bulleted lists, radio buttons and checkboxes, to this apparently magical number (cf., e.g., Eisenberg, 2004). Very loosely based on an influential article by Miller (1956), this “magical” number provides designers with an easy guideline to estimate how many elements their products can maximally contain without overcharging the cognitive capabilities of their users. One of these principles is the “magical number seven”. ![]() Unfortunately, however, they are usually false. Their prominent characteristics are that they are broadly applicable and easy to grasp for the psychological layperson. There are several apparently axiomatic design principles that purport to be perfectly adjusted to the human cognitive system.
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