Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

117 Miller’s Law

The number of objects an average person can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2.

Miller’s law, proposed by the psychologist George Miller, states that the maximum number of novel things a person can remember after a brief exposure is 7 ± 2. More recent studies put the number of things one can remember at 4 ± 1. The most important aspect of Miller’s law is the concept of chunking. The term chunk refers to a unit of information in short-term memory — a string of letters, a word, or a series of numbers. The technique of chunking accommodates short-term memory limits by formatting information into four or five units. For example, few people can remember a list of 10 words for 30 seconds. Group the list of 10 words into chunks of three ...