THE “CHUNKING” THEORIES
Alree Hiskey and Franny Valour
George A Miller

Born February 3, 1920

Created the “chunking” theory.

Miller said that his theory should increase short
term memory for low information content by
recoding them into a smaller amount of highinformation items.
Definitions

Chunk- a collection of elements having strong
associations with elements of other chunks of
information
 Chunks
can be made of any groups of information
 Are the original element of all subsequent theories of
memory
 General theory of human cognition
Principles



Short term memory limited 5 to 7
chunks of memory.
Planning Is a fundamental cognitive
process
Behavior is hierarchically organized
How to acquire “chunks”

Computation Model: to become an expert in a
field, information must be learned by getting a
large database of chunks organized by a
discrimination net
Chunkin’


Makes better use of Short term memory with low
information content by making the brain recode it into
a smaller amount of high information content items
The recoding turns the information into long term
memory using perception and meaning
Citations



Chunking (psychology). Wikipedia, 26 Mar. 2011. Web. 5 Apr. 2011
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)>.
Long, Victor & David Snitkof. Chunking Theory. Expertise in Memory, 2005.
Web. 5 Apr. 2011 <http://snitkof.com/cg156/chunkingtheory.php>.
Kearsly, Greg Information Processing Theory. 2011. 5 Apr. 2011
<http://tip.psychology.org/index.html>.