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Topic: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two

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	The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		In it Miller showed a number of remarkable coincidences between the channel capacity of a number of human cognitive and perceptual tasks.
		The upper limit of your visualisation of a number represented as dots is your subsisting limit for that exercise.
		Two seconds is the duration of the English spoken form of 7±2 digits (in Chinese it around 9 and Welsh around 6), the variation is highly correlated with the rate at which people speak.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two (784 words)

	Chunking (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		At a time when information theory was beginning to be applied in psychology, Miller observed that whereas some human cognitive tasks fit the model of a "channel capacity" characterized by a roughly constant capacity in bits, short-term memory did not.
		The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Alternate text of Miller's 1956 paper
		The magical number seven in language and cognition
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Chunking_(psychology) (581 words)

	Classics in the History of Psychology -- Miller (1956) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Since these two studies were done in different laboratories with slightly different techniques and methods of analysis, we are not in a good position to argue whether five loudnesses is significantly different from six pitches.
		The two functions are so similar that is seems fair to conclude that the number of responses available to the observer had nothing to do with the channel capacity of 3.25 bits.
		In spite of the coincidence that the magical number seven appears in both places, the span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory are quite different kinds of limitations that are imposed on our ability to process information.
	psychclassics.yorku.ca /Miller (8305 words)

	The Magical Number Seven
		This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable.
		As the amount of input information is increased by increasing from 2 to 14 the number of different pitches to be judged, the amount of transmitted information approaches as its upper limit a channel capacity of about 2.5 bits per judgment.
		This is one of the ways in which the magical number seven has persecuted me. Here we have two closely related kinds of experiments, both of which point to the significance of the number seven as a limit on our capacities.
	cispom.boisestate.edu /cis320emaxson/seven.htm (8390 words)

	Numbers: number 7
		A septennium is a period of seven years and September used to be the seventh month in the year, but not any longer.
		Among many things that come in sevens are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Seven Sisters, Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man, the Seven Levels of Hell, and the Seven Dwarves.
		Seven is not really a magic number, but does have an uncanny way of appearing in all sorts of odd situations.
	richardphillips.org.uk /number/Num7.htm (731 words)

	magical number four with Harnad editing
		For example, in remembering two lines of poetry that rhyme, an astute reader may articulate the words covertly so as to strengthen the temporary accessibility of a phonological or articulatory code in addition to whatever lexical code already was strong.
		Although the number of consonants reported in the correct position depended on the duration of the array, the range of numbers was quite similar to other studies, with means for phonologically dissimilar sets of consonants ranging from about 3 with 100-msec exposure times to about 5.5 with 1250-msec exposure times.
		In their Experiment 1, the mean number of items recalled was 2.71 when the items were radicals without familiar pronounceable names, and 6.38 (like the usual English memory span) when the items were characters with pronounceable, rehearsable names, within which radicals were embedded.
	www.bbsonline.org /documents/a/00/00/04/46/bbs00000446-00/bbs.cowan.html (20091 words)

	CIOS - (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Is Q in principle capable of detecting far more (far more!) than 6 plus or minus 2 clusters of individuals if many (not necessarily all) the diverse (on the surface) groupings of people have indeed captured in one way or the other (e.g., special observation, evolution of verbal behavior) unique components of the supernatural?
		Declaring that there are a limited number of independent varieties of anything before conducting the empirical footwork is somewhat premature, it would seem.
		I hope it is not the case that Q analyses > continue>>> yielding a relatively small number of factors due the an > >> artifact.
	www.cios.org /mailboxes/Q-method/02185092.954 (1340 words)

	Magic Seven
		The existence of Miller's "magical number" implies that systems designers should impose rules on the development of a system which would make it unlikely that any particular section will be beyond any individual programmer's comprehension.
		One of the obvious applications of the five plus or minus two heuristic means, in the design of program modules, that IS personnel must conscientiously apply the rules of high cohesion and loose coupling.
		Should IS personnel suggest that there should be no more than five plus or minus two program structures (Dijkstra's simple sequence, selection and iteration) in a module that is highly cohesive?There are numerous areas in software engineering where a more sensible approach to chunking could improve the quality of most computer-based systems.
	cispom.boisestate.edu /cis320emaxson/magsev.htm (2229 words)

	Past Issues - UI Design Newsletter
		At least partially because of the success of Miller’s paper, the number "seven" is now almost universally and erroneously accepted as the human capacity limit for a wide range of issues.
		I have had people tell that the "Magic 7" paper is the reason why the local telephone number has seven numbers.
		LeCompte, D. Seven, plus or minus two, is too much to bear: Three (or fewer) is the real magic number, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 289-292.
	www.humanfactors.com /downloads/sep00.asp (681 words)

	ClickZ Experts on Actionable Metrics Strategies
		George A. Miller penned a research paper in 1956, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." It was groundbreaking in its time.
		The number and depth of these elements should be determined by their relevance to the visitors themselves.
		Seven is a wonderful number, but don't let it keep you from designing a persuasive Web site.
	www.clickz.com /experts/crm/actionable_analysis/print.php/3427631 (762 words)

	magic number
		The classic examples of these are the numbers used in hash or CRC functions, or the coefficients in a linear congruential generator for pseudo-random numbers.
		Numeric overflows (particularly with signed data types) and run-time errors (divide by zero, stack overflows) are indications of magic numbers.
		The Y2K scare was probably the most notorious magic number non-incident.
	www.catb.org /~esr/jargon/html/M/magic-number.html (322 words)

	The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two - TheBestLinks.com - Hrair limit, Bit, Information, 1956, ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		At some point it becomes impossible to visualise the dots as a single pattern (a process known as subitising), and one thinks of, say, eight as two groups of four.
		The upper limit of your visualisation of a number represented as dots is your subitising limit for that exercise.
		The term hrair limit was used by Ed Yourdon in his Modern Structured Analysis (Prentice Hall, 1979) to mean the maximum number of subroutines that should be called from the main program, again set at between 5 and 9.
	www.thebestlinks.com /Hrair_limit.html (475 words)

	CEP 909 - Short Term Memory Experiment - Danah Henriksen 9/16/03
		In cases where there were seven or less pieces of data given, the subject managed to answer all correctly with perfect accuracy.
		Seven, plus or minus two, held true as the “magic” number in all unrelated trials.
		Numbers or letters that are grouped in some fashion so as to create a “richer, more complex” form or “chunk” of information, can be more readily encoded and recalled to memory.
	www.msu.edu /~henrikse/cep909/memoryexperiment.htm (688 words)

	[No title]
		In 1956, George Miller published an essay entitled "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information." Miller described a laboratory study in which subjects listened to a number (referred to as "n") of auditory tones that varied only in pitch.
		In everyday life, of course, we are capable of handling far more than seven (plus or minus two) pieces of information at once.
		The number of digits (or in our case, the number of cow events) that the subject can remember is an indication of his or her working memory capacity.
	www.brainconnection.com /games?main=cow/cow-qa (808 words)

	Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Syntactic Structure Recognition in Japanese and English Sentences ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Syntactic Structure Recognition in Japanese and English Sentences (ResearchIndex)
		Ve counted the number of bunsetsus (phrases) whose modifiees axe undetermined in each step of an analysis of the dependency structure of Japanese sentences, and which therefore must be stored in short-term memory.
		The number was roughly less than nine, the upper bound of seven plus or minus two.
	citeseer.ist.psu.edu /551842.html (363 words)

	Buffering and Human Memory
		As we noted under the Rule of Seven in the Premises chapter, these limitations have implications that echo all through UI design.
		The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information [Miller] is one of the foundation papers in cognitive psychology (and, incidentally, the specific reason that U.S. local telephone numbers have seven digits).
		Miller showed that the number of discrete items of information human beings can hold in short-term memory is seven, plus or minus two.
	www.catb.org /~esr/writings/taouu/html/ch04s06.html (506 words)

	Hart’s Law; The Magical Number Three, Plus or Minus Zero (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		George Miller, infamous for his "magical number seven, plus or minus two," somehow missed an even more important principle of how the world works: no matter how clever we think we are, it still takes us three tries to get anything approximately right.
		Our world would be a happier place if this were all we had to worry about, but sadly, those who develop the products we document are never satisfied with "good enough", and perversely insist on one more kick at the cat.
		Three tries later, Hart’s law predicts, we’ll probably get there, only to discover a new cat, a new audience, and a new manager—and then, haunted by yet another instance of the magical number three, we start the process all over again.
	www.stcsig.org /usability/newsletter/0204-hartslaw.html (718 words)

	The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two - Nonliteral
		I first ran into The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two quite some time ago, and it’s influenced my approach to many things over time.
		Although of course there’s no substitute for actually following the link and reading the whole thing, the upshot of this is that most people can manage to keep seven discrete items in their mind simultaneously, although some folks can deal with as many as nine, and others as few as five.
		If you’re dealing with a large number, for example, it’s easier for people to memorize it (or even retype it correctly) if you break it into chunks of five digits or smaller.
	nonliteral.com /articles/the-magical-number-seven-plus-or-minus-two (754 words)

	George Miller
		I believe that the reason the George Miller is considered to be one of the founders of cognitive science is because of the work he did around 1956 when The Magical Number Seven was published.
		The short term memory is limited to about seven (5-9) units, and memory limitations can be overcome by 1) making relative rather than absolute judgments, 2) increasing the number of dimensions which stimuli can differ, or 3) by arranging the task into sequences of several absolute judgments in a row.
		In a dictionary'tree'would be given the definition of plant (the superordinate term) plus a meaning that describes how this noun is different from all others.
	www.cs.oswego.edu /~blue/hx/courses/cogsci1/s2001/section05/subsection9/main.html (703 words)

	Citebase - Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Syntactic Structure Recognition in Japanese and English Sentences
		Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Syntactic Structure Recognition in Japanese and English Sentences
		George A. Miller said that human beings have only seven chunks in short-term memory, plus or minus two.
		We counted the number of bunsetsus (phrases) whose modifiees are undetermined in each step of an analysis of the dependency structure of Japanese sentences, and which therefore must be stored in short-term memory.
	citebase.eprints.org /cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:arXiv.org:cs/0103010 (474 words)

	MaclooMedia: The Magical Number Seven (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		An article titled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," came to my attention when someone told me it contains the first occurrence of the word "chunk" being applied to the...
		An article titled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," came to my attention when someone told me it contains the first occurrence of the word "chunk" being applied to the way people organize information.
		In humans as in computers, storage and processing are two separate functions.
	www.macloo.com /blog/archives/000031.html (268 words)

	Digital Web Magazine - News - Cognitive load and the rule of seven (or how many is too many)
		September 3, 2004 at 12:14 PM Ok, so I have done some deep researching about "how many is too many" (as far as links and information bits on a page) and I thought I would share some of this with the Digital Web Magazine readership.
		Most of my research pointed to this paper, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller, published in 1956 mind you.
		My understanding was that the "magic number 7" referred mainly to our telephone system (seven digits and then an area code...so actually 10).
	www.digital-web.com /news/2004/09/rule_of_seven (582 words)

	EServer TC Library: Magical Numbers: The Seven-Plus-or-Minus-Two Myth (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		George Millerís ìmagical number seven, plus or minus twoî is poorly understood and, consequently, blindly applied to professional communication.
		As an example, I have heard speakers explicitly allow themselves up to seven items of up to seven words on each visual aid, in addition to the title.
		Any such slide would fail any real-life test of effectiveness, such as briefly showing the slide while going on talking, then asking the audience what was on it.
	tc.eserver.org /13758.html (118 words)

	990303 Received letter from District Counsel with USACE on Comm Metrics.
		ref OF 4 8491 442342 - Examples illustrating the dominance of the number seven (7) in 442343 - cultural practices are...
		Seven men of Troy assembled to reason, ref SDS 6 4080 442349 - 5.
		Seven commanders in War of the Seven 442350 - 6.
	www.welchco.com /sd/08/00101/02/99/03/03/134948.HTM (4963 words)

	Ask E.T.: The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Not relevant for design
		Indeed, the deep point of Miller's paper is to suggest strategies, such as placing information within a context, that extend the reach of memory beyond tiny clumps of data.
		The same argument was used in the Lady Bird Johnson Act to prohibit billboards within X feet of highways, and the billboard industry (a strange group that deserves an essay of its own) was hurting.
		What I find interesting is that there is an assumption in the above references that we all live in an eternal powerpoint presentation or 30 second advertising spot where we have no control over the rate at which the information is being presented and that we have to remember what is being presented.
	www.edwardtufte.com /bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000U6&topic_id=1 (2127 words)

	Marathon's Story... Facts and puzzling things about (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		In the film the numbers 3, 7, and 10, displayed as Roman numerals III, VII, and X, are used to locate the tomb of a Knight (Templar) of the Crusades, a tomb which holds the clue to finding the Holy Grail and immortality.
		I also noticed that G (in Son of Grendel) is the seventh letter of the alphabet, Grendel is a seven letter word, and when you divide the level number for Son of Grendel(21) by 3(the number of words in the level name), you get seven.
		Bill makes the point that while the explicit seven reference has been noted on The Number Seven section there is an hidden seven in the form of the Greek letter "eta".
	marathon.bungie.org /story/seven.html (7089 words)

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