Miller`s Rule of 7

1. Number of colors in a range2. Number of product groups in a collection3. Visual representation in stores4. Visual topics in communication, etc. As far as I can remember, the “magic” of the number seven is that George Miller had to give a 1-hour presentation when he didn`t have enough research on a particular topic to talk about it for so long. He therefore tried to link unrelated lines of research, the only link between them being that they have cognitive impairment of similar magnitude (“7+/-2 items”). However, the comparison was not very serious and mostly rhetorical. I think the short answer is: no, it`s not valid, and it never really was. In the mid-1970s, the field readily adopted Baddeley`s general assumption that a delay replaces an article limitation (cf. Barrouillet, Portrat and Camos, 2011; Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982), where apparent restrictions on items arise indirectly from time limits (e.g., Schweickert & Boruff, 1986). Beginning in graduate school from 1974, I too focused primarily on time limits, but my reading in this area led me to the nagging feeling that different people were saying things that were strongly contradictory to each other given the striking difference between time-limited effects and articles. The question for me was whether both types of limit values could apply.

I thought they could, and suggested (Cowan, 1988, p. 166): We keep talking about customer buy-in. It all starts with attention. Attention begins with our ability to keep our observation in human memory. Imagine if it were human RAM. 2. Limited time (memory is very fragile and information can be lost due to distraction or the passage of time) In this way, segmenting helps to improve the performance of our short-term memory, which is of course essential for further processing and storage of knowledge. I`ve touched on at least three possible reasons why Miller`s famous paper didn`t generate a wave of extensive research into the capacity limits of articles that could be expected in the years immediately following. (1) On the one hand, the boundary seemed to depend on the circumstances or requirements of the task in a way that was not understood. Therefore, it was not clear that there was a fixed limit value that needed to be tested. (2) Miller`s (1956) probably most important contribution was his observation that the measurement of information in bits, so popular in the engineering world, could not explain the limitations of human working memory (as opposed to computers).

Instead, what mattered to humans was the number of coherent and significant units in the head, or what are now called pieces. This observation was clear and virtually obvious, and few researchers disputed it, so the case seemed closed. (3) Finally, Miller compared the descriptions of several very different position limit values. He began with the ironic complaint that he was haunted by an integer and concluded with the timid statement that he suspected the similarity between the phenomena he discussed only as “a pernicious Pythagorean coincidence.” Scientists avoid topics that might make a joke out of it (e.g., cold fusion), so exploring possible commonalities between real-world phenomena has been discouraged, as I would inadvertently assume. Tarnow finds that in a classical experiment usually argued by Murdock as supporting a 4-element buffer, there is actually no evidence of this, and so the “magic number”, at least in Murdock`s experiment, is 1. [14] [15] Other important theories of short-term memory capacity argue against measuring capacity in relation to a fixed number of elements. [16] [17] “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”[1] is one of the most cited books in psychology. [2] [3] [4] It was developed by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Harvard University`s Department of Psychology and published in Psychological Review in 1956. It is often interpreted as stating that the number of objects an average person can fit in short-term memory is 7 ± 2.

This has sometimes been called Miller`s Law. [5] [6] [7] This type of two-element, time-limited approach appears to have some validity (e.g., Cowan, Lichty, & Grove, 1990; Chen and Cowan, 2009), although the two types of boundaries must be carefully separated from interference effects (Cowan, Saults and Blume, 2014; Oberauer, Lewandowsky, Farrell, Jarrold, & Greaves, 2012; Ricker and Cowan, 2014). This was especially important for early adopters. Because they didn`t have time to encode the information into long-term memory. We live in a world where the amount of information is growing exponentially. By not organizing it properly or eliminating some completely, it ends up degrading our ability to perform critical tasks in order to survive (navigation/income gain). That`s why it`s so helpful to leave out the items, products, and services in your life that don`t offer a quality return on investment. This is consistent with the Pareto principle, the idea that 80% of your results come from 20% of your investments. Do you juggle too many tasks a day to be effective? Is your team using too many collaboration tools? Do you have too many members on your team? Are you overloading your new employees with information, which creates confusion? According to Atkinson and Shiffrin (1971), the duration of short-term memory appears to be between 15 and 30 seconds. Objects can be maintained in short-term memory by repeating them verbally (acoustic coding), a process called repetition. 3.

Coding (mainly acoustic, even translation of visual information into sounds). Content segmentation, cognitive load theory, memory enhancement techniques, rule of 7 plus or minus 2 Here is a short article that answers your question in more detail: At Stylumia, we strive to make our user experience as simple as possible with less cognitive load. This is one of the reasons why we have adopted a visual approach to Business Intelligence.