The Magical Number 4: BBS Call for Commentators
Stevan Harnad
harnad at coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tue Feb 8 14:18:25 EST 2000
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article
THE MAGICAL NUMBER 4 IN SHORT-TERM MEMORY:
A RECONSIDERATION OF MENTAL STORAGE CAPACITY
by Nelson Cowan
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.cowan.html
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
*** please see also 5 important announcements about new BBS
policies and address change at the bottom of this message) ***
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL by March 7th to:
bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
or write to:
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
ECS: New Zepler Building
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and
commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates.
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
with a WWW browser according to the instructions that follow after the
abstract.
_____________________________________________________________
THE MAGICAL NUMBER 4 IN SHORT-TERM MEMORY:
A RECONSIDERATION OF MENTAL STORAGE CAPACITY
Nelson Cowan
Department of Psychology
University of Missouri
210 McAlester Hall
Columbia, MO 65211, USA
CowanN at missouri.edu
http://web.missouri.edu/~psycowan
KEYWORDS: attention, enumeration, information chunks, memory
capacity, processing capacity, processing channels, serial recall,
short-term memory, storage capacity, verbal recall, working memory
capacity.
ABSTRACT: Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can
remember about 7 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 3
to 5 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 4 chunks is implicated along with other, non-capacity-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.
___________________________________________________________
To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web or by anonymous ftp from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.
The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.cowan.html
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
____________________________________________________________
*** FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS ***
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(1) There have been some very important developments in the
area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently.
Please see:
Science:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
Nature:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
American Scientist:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm
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(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their
Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints:
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers
available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone.
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(3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically.
Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions
archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing
Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive.
Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the
public BBS Archive:
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/
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(4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing
bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be
offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is
also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic
submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit
papers to:
Email: bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Web: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk
http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
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(5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal had only
been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because
of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota
will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we
treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
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