Capacity
of Short-Term Memory and Chunking
This
short demonstration helps students to discover the limited capacity of
short-term memory (STM). This activity takes about 10 minutes.
Recall
List 1 in order:
How
many letters did you get correct?
On
average, how many items did members of the class remember?
You
only needed to remember the information for a very short period of time, so why
couldn’t you remember all of the letters that were read?
Recall
List 2 in order:
How
many letters did you get correct?
Compare
your scores on lists 1 and 2.
What
do you think contributed to the difference in performance?