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George Miller Short Term Memory Recall

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In the results, it is shown that there is a higher percentage recall rate for those only looking at letters and not letters and numbers; this is promising information as it supports the hypothesis. It is also shown throughout the results that the maximum characters remembered was ten letters. It is interesting how it was letters and does not breach the ±7 concept proposed by Miller. Since it was letters, X U O B A V C I A Z, it fits the idea of recoding information to increase the size of chunks. Remembering the sounds and syllables of the letters could be used to increase the chunk size. For instance, the letters could be broken into XUO-BAV-CI-AZ and remembered using only four chunks opposed to 10, drastically decreasing the chances …show more content…

There are differing forms of memory, three main forms are short, active/working and long term memories. Active is a form of memory used when recalling steps such as when baking and reading off a recipe. Short and long are named due to the duration in which the events seen are recalled for. Long term memory involves memories that have been stored in a more permanent place much like a hard drive on a computer. Short term memories are chunks of information that are only temporarily stored and without repetition and use of tactics to remember, will be …show more content…

Miller also suggests that short term memory last from 0 to 30 seconds. Miller goes on to talk about recoding of information and how it affects the process of memory. Since memory is fixed to a certain number of chunks to improve your memory capacity, and therefore increase the amount of information you can retrieve, you have to increase the size of the chunks. This can be done by using different methods to create bigger variations of information. Say someone is learning Morse code, initially every dot and dash is considered one chunk, but as you progress and learn each code for each letter then you will remember larger chunks. Eventually words will be learnt and consequently increase the size of information remembered. This is a tactic to increase short and active memory by essentially increasing chunk size, but not changing the core ±7 bits of

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