The magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Infomation - Essay Example

In must also be noted that in this experimentation, Miller used the new concept of not measuring results by any unit of measurement such as centimetres or feet, instead they settled on measuring by bit of information. In the end, they concluded that to increase the amount of information there are two ways to do it. First, you can increase the rate at which the information is given to the observer and the second is to increase the number of alternative stimuli and ignore the time variable (Miller, 1956).

Miller (1956) also discussed the value of the magical number seven to both the unidimensional and multidimensional stimuli. Studies have supported that the number seven worked on the unidimensional judgment but Miller believed that it should not end there. He studied the multi-dimensional judgment and believed that there exist independent variable attributes of the stimuli that may explain why the one-dimensional variables fail to give constant result in the experiments. The multi-dimensional judgment was able to conclude that as we increase the number of stimuli, there is a decrease in accuracy or capability to retain information (Miller, 1956).

The article also concluded that the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember is limited by the existence of span of absolute judgment and span of immediate memory. Miller also clearly stated and valued the importance of the process of recoding. According to him, this process is being used by people when communicating. The process of recognizing the patterns of the codes or the so-called dits and dahs is very important to solve the problems of individual differences.

According to this process, people take inputs, group them and give this name a group or chunking (Miller, 1956). As Miller conducted the research, he discussed the theory of information which provides the benchmark for measuring the stimulus and performance instead of using any unit of measurement. The information concepts in this theory were proven useful in the study of language and discrimination, study of learning and memory, and also the study of concept formation (Miller, 1956). In this article, Miller is suggesting strategies on how to improve and extend the capability of human mind to retain memory.

The experiment conducted showed that people are having a hard time remembering more than 7 different stimuli. This is what they found out after the experiment on immediate memory. The time when the study of Miller was conducted the scientist paid little if not totally no attention to the inner workings or cognition. The behaviourist ruled before the 1950s and they claimed that there is no need to study human mind because it directly produce evident behaviour. They resist any study about the “black box.

” The enthusiasts of behaviour believed that it is essential to study behaviour than human mind or cognition. When Miller conducted his research and study, it was an era of behaviourism Miller was one of the scientist and psychologists who led the cognitive revolution and made researches that deals with human mind and cognitive processes (The Cognitive Revolution, n.d.). Miller’s study is said to be historically important because it established a person’s capacity to remember. His paper suggested that human’s sensory modalities are limited in the amount of the information they can remember and the research concluded that it is 7 +/- 2 (Linhares, Aranha,