Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can remember about seven chunks in short-
term memory (STM) tasks. However, that number was meant more as a rough estimate and …

Commentators expressed a wide variety of views on whether there is a basic capacity limit of
3 to 5 chunks and, among those who believe in it, about why it occurs. In this response, I …

Tying together almost four decades of neo-Piagetian research, Cognitive Development
provides a unique critical analysis and a comparison of concepts across neo-Piagetian …

Cowan's revisiting of the magic number is very timely and the case he makes for a more
moderate number than seven is persuasive. It is also appropriate to frame his case within a …

The aim of our commentary is to strengthen Cowan's proposal for an inherent capacity
limitation in STM by suggesting a neurobiological mechanism based on competitive …

Cowan assumes that chunk-based capacity limits are synonymous with the essence of a
“specialized STM mechanism.” In a single experiment, we measured the capacity, or span …

Some of the evidence for a “magical number 4” has come from the study of visual cognition,
and Cowan reinterprets such evidence in terms of a single general limit on memory and …

Measures of retrieval speed for recently presented events show a sharp dichotomy between
representations in focal attention and representations that are recently processed but no …

According to span theory, a behavioral theory of the magical numbers, Cowan's 4 and
Miller's 7 are simply two different points on the same ogive describing the relation between …

A temporal account of the mental capacities for processing information may not be relevant
in a context where the goal is to search for storage capacity expressed in chunks. However …