Constancy in short-term memory: Bits and chunks.

Kleinberg, Joel; Kaufman, Herbert M.

doi:10.1037/h0031563

Cited by 19 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…On some readings, chunking requires conceptual recoding of the type involved when parsing PBSBBCCNN into PBS, BBC, and CNN. Such recoding entails that each of the newly created representational units corresponds to an existing, unitary concept in long-term memory (e.g., CNN is the media corporation that employs Wolf Blitzer) (36,37). A different definition of chunking also requires conceptual knowledge, but does not require recoding.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

Feigenson

Halberda

2008

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

114

117

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Adults can expand their limited working memory capacity by using stored conceptual knowledge to chunk items into interrelated units. For example, adults are better at remembering the letter string PBSBBCCNN after parsing it into three smaller units: the television acronyms PBS, BBC, and CNN. Is this chunking a learned strategy acquired through instruction? We explored the origins of this ability by asking whether untrained infants can use conceptual knowledge to increase memory. In the absence of any grouping cues, 14-month-old infants can track only three hidden objects at once, demonstrating the standard limit of working memory. In four experiments we show that infants can surpass this limit when given perceptual, conceptual, linguistic, or spatial cues to parse larger arrays into smaller units that are more efficiently stored in memory. This work offers evidence of memory expansion based on conceptual knowledge in untrained, preverbal subjects. Our findings demonstrate that without instruction, and in the absence of robust language, a fundamental memory computation is available throughout the lifespan, years before the development of explicit metamemorial strategies.orking memory capacity is severely limited in adults (1-6) and infants (7-11), with both groups able to remember only about three separate items at once. One reason that adults are rarely conscious of this constraint is that we can hierarchically reorganize the to-be-remembered stimuli, thereby increasing the total number of items we can store. For example, the letter string PBSBBCCNN is much easier to recall after recognizing the three familiar television acronyms PBS, BBC, and CNN that comprise it. This chunking entails the use of previously acquired concepts to parse an undivided array into smaller units that are more efficiently stored in memory. The stored representation now has two nested levels: the chunks (the television acronyms) and their components (the letters within each acronym).Hierarchical memory reorganization is widely relied on by adults (12-17), both as an explicit strategy and as an unconscious memory process (14,18,19), but its origins remain a mystery. Five-year-old children can hierarchically structure memory if provided explicit instruction (20)(21)(22), raising the possibility that this process is a cultural construction acquired through explicit teaching. Infants have been shown to group items based on perceptual or statistical features (23-25), but such grouping does not truly expand item-based memory limits because it fails to preserve representations of the groups' individual components. And although infants exhibit greater memory capacity for spatially grouped than ungrouped items (26), this ability differs from classical chunking because it relies on external cues rather than internally stored knowledge. Therefore, it remains unknown how humans attain the ability to expand working memory based on previously acquired knowledge. Here, we tested whether this ability is learned through explicit instruction by examining ...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

Feigenson

Halberda

2008

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

114

117

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“…Another promising strategy would be to begin with unconnected units and teach the subjects new chunks (with learning assessment), so that the chunks are known to the experimenter before they are used in a working memory task. Kleinberg and Kaufman (1971) carried out one procedure in which the role of chunking in recall was tackled rather directly. Subjects were presented with clusters of 13 dots, each forming a complex, symmetrical pattern.…”

Section: R221 a Strategy For Research To Identify Chunksmentioning

confidence: 99%

The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity

Cowan¹

2001

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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 a rhetorical device than as a real capacity limit. Others have since suggested that there is a more precise capacity limit, but that it is only three to five chunks. The present target article brings together a wide variety of data on capacity limits suggesting that the smaller capacity limit is real. Capacity limits will be useful in analyses of information processing only if the boundary conditions for observing them can be carefully described. Four basic conditions in which chunks can be identified and capacity limits can accordingly be observed are: (1) when information overload limits chunks to individual stimulus items, (2) when other steps are taken specifically to block the recoding of stimulus items into larger chunks, (3) in performance discontinuities caused by the capacity limit, and (4) in various indirect effects of the capacity limit. Under these conditions, rehearsal and long-term memory cannot be used to combine stimulus items into chunks of an unknown size; nor can storage mechanisms that are not capacity-limited, such as sensory memory, allow the capacity-limited storage mechanism to be refilled during recall. A single, central capacity limit averaging about four chunks is implicated along with other, noncapacity-limited sources. The pure STM capacity limit expressed in chunks is distinguished from compound STM limits obtained when the number of separately held chunks is unclear. Reasons why pure capacity estimates fall within a narrow range are discussed and a capacity limit for the focus of attention is proposed.

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“…One of the factors that determines whether the benefit of chunking outweighs the cost may be the size of the chunks; the capacity savings achieved by using a larger chunk may outweigh the cost of encoding and decoding those chunks. Indeed, several studies have demonstrated that chunking really does have a cost (Glanzer & Fleishman, 1967;Huang & Awh, 2018;Kleinberg & Kaufman, 1971;Pollack & Johnson, 1965). Glanzer and Fleishman (1967) had participants recall sequences of nine binary digits presented simultaneously for 0.5s.…”

Section: The Cost Of Chunkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…WebPlotDigitizer https://automeris.io/WebPlotDigitizer/index.html) Kleinberg and Kaufman (1971) tested memory for visual patterns. At fast presentation rates (less than one second) memory was constant in terms of amount of information, but memory became constant in chunks at slower rates.…”

Section: The Cost Of Chunkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chunking and redintegration in verbal short-term memory

Norris¹,

Kalm²

2018

Preprint

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Memory for verbal material improves when words form familiar chunks. But how does theimprovement due to chunking come about? Two possible explanations are that the inputmight be actively recoded into chunks, each of which takes up less memory capacity thanitems not forming part of a chunk (a form of data compression), or that chunking is basedon redintegration. If chunking is achieved by redintegration, representations of chunks existonly in long-term memory and help to reconstructing degraded traces in short-termmemory. In six experiments using two-alternative forced choice recognition and immediateserial recall, we find that when chunks are small (two words) they display a patternsuggestive of redintegration, while larger chunks (three words), show a pattern consistentwith data compression. This is concurs with previous data showing that there is a costinvolved in recoding material into chunks in short-term memory. With smaller chunks thiscost seems to outweigh the benefits of recoding words into chunks. The main features ofthe serial recall data can be captured by a simple extension to the Primacy model of Pageand Norris (1998).

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Constancy in short-term memory: Bits and chunks.

Cited by 19 publications

References 16 publications

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity

Chunking and redintegration in verbal short-term memory

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