Melbourne: Four, not seven, is the "magic number" when it comes to items of information the mind can cope with before confusion sets in.
A new analysis by a leading Australian psychiatrist challenges the long-held view of psychological lore of seven being the number, suggesting it might actually be four.
In 1956, American psychologist George Miller published a study arguing the mind could cope with a maximum of only seven chunks of information. The study paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information", has since become one of the most highly cited psychology articles and has been judged by the Psychological Review as its most influential paper of all time.
However, University of New South Wales professor of psychiatry Gordon Parker says a re-analysis of the experiments used by Miller shows he missed the correct number by a wide mark. Writing in the Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, Parker says a closer look at the evidence shows the human mind copes with a maximum of four 'chunks' of information, not seven. PTI  |
