Miller's Theory of Short-Term Memory and 7 plus/minus 2 1
Theory: Miller’s Theory of Short-Term Memory and 7 plus/minus 2
Miller’s theory is founded on the basis that the human mental capacity has a finite span of immediate or short term memory which has shown to be approximately seven chunks of data plus or minus two (Miller,1994). His original work was printed in the Psychology Review in
1956 and is still being analyzed and cited today by those examining the human capacity for short term memory.
Theorist : George A. Miller
Biography :
George Armitage Miller (1920 - ) is an American cognitive psychologist who has taught at several prestigious universities to include Harvard, Rockefeller and Princeton. He originally received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama with a major in speech therapy and continued on to earn a Master’s degree in speech. While working with individuals with speaking difficulties, he recognized speech problems should be addressed by the clinical psychology field. In 1942, Miller went to Harvard to study clinical psychology and was noted as a particularly astute experimentalist and scientific theorist. His experimental work in memory, language, and psychophysics led him to write his best-known study “The Magical Number Seven
Plus or Minus Two” (1956), where he theorized the limit of human short term memory
(Blumenthal, 2000).
Miller received the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science from the American Psychological Foundation in recognition of his distinguished accomplishments in

Miller's Theory of Short-Term Memory and 7 plus/minus 2 2 the study of cognition, language, and communication. He is the author of more than 160 publications to include his first book, Language and Communication, in 1951 and his later book,
Language and Perception (1976) with Philip Johnson-Laird. Both books proved to be important works in the field of cognitive science (American Psychologist, 1991).
Description of Theory :
According to Miller (1994), there is a limit on our ability to process information which depends on our span of absolute judgment and our span of immediate memory. He describes absolute judgment as being limited by the amount of information we retain which is built upon by the ability of our immediate memory to process information which , in turn, is limited to a set number of items in the order of seven plus or minus two. Miller developed the concepts of both recoding and chunking which helped to explain his theory on our capacity to process information. He asserted that since the capacity of short term memory is a fixed number of chunks, we can increase the amount of information we can process by building larger and larger chunks (Miller 1994). Recoding as described by Miller is the process of grouping and organizing these chunks to aid in the ability for immediate recall of information.
More recent studies often cite Miller’s work primarily for the important concepts of recoding and chunking. Shriffin and Nosofsky (1994) point out the limitations of memory span are often interpreted in theoretical frameworks different from Miller’s original work. According the
Shriffin and Nosofsky (1994), much of the later research in the area of short term memory paradigms primarily involves the retrieval ability of both short and long term memory.

Miller's Theory of Short-Term Memory and 7 plus/minus 2 3
Theory Measurement/Instrumentation:
Experiments in Miller’s theory consist of the ability of participants to immediately recall newly gained information. Much of the experimentation analyzed by Miller detailed the methods of coding or chunking the information to the level of comparing specific bits of information. For example, decimal digits equal about 3.3 bits per digit whereas an English word would be worth about 10 bits of information (Miller, 1994). Miller determined the number of bits of information is constant for absolute judgment and the number of chunks of information constant for immediate memory. Therefore, immediate memory was almost independent of the number of bits per chunk (Miller, 1994). Building on the Miller’s experiments, Baddeley (1994) has focused on the variables which would influence the number of chunks held in short term memory. He has examined the effect of such items as the similarity between the chunks of information, the spoken duration, the length of time of rehearsal, and the word lengths. Baddeley has also related the ability of subjects to recode information to the level of previous learning. He asserts that immediately recall may be time based rather than chunk based (Baddeley, 1994).
Report Prepared by : Ed Crews
References
Baddeley, A. (1994). The Magical Number Seven: Still Magic after All These Years?
Psychological Review, 101 (2), 353-356.
Blumenthal, A. L. (2000). Miller, George Armitage. In A. E. Kazdin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of psychology, Vol. 5.
(pp. 270-271). Washington, DC New York, NY USUS: American
Psychological Association

Miller's Theory of Short-Term Memory and 7 plus/minus 2 4
Gold Medal Awards for Life Achievement: George Armitage Miller. (1991). American
Psychologist, 46 (4), 326-328. doi: 10.1037/0003-066x.46.4.326
Miller, G. A. (1994). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 101 (2), 343-352. doi:
10.1037/0033-295x.101.2.343
Shiffrin, R. M., & Nosofsky, R. M. (1994). Seven plus or minus two: A commentary on capacity limitations. Psychological Review, 101 (2), 357-361. doi: 10.1037/0033-
295x.101.2.357