20. People remember only four items at once.

Summary of Chapter 20:

- The phase “the magical number seven, plus or minus two” comes from a research paper by George A. Miller that explains that people can remember from five to nine things at once, but has been proven wrong.

- The one who questioned against the urban legend was Psychologist Alan Baddeley and found out it was just a discussion which was not backed up with any research.

- People are able to hold three to four things in working memory as long as they aren’t distracted and their processing of information is not interfered with.

- That’s why people tend to chuck information in groups for example, U.S. phone numbers. - The four-item rule applies not only to working memory, but also to long-term memory.

- George Mandler (1969) showed the people could memorize information in categories and retrieving one to three items from there memories perfectly from a category. - People can remember 80% of four to six items in a category.

- 20% it there were 80 items in the category.

- Donald Broadbent (1975) asked people to recall items in different categories, for example, the Seven Dwarfs, the seven colors of the rainbow, the countries of Europe, and the names of current shows on TV. People remembered two to four items in groups.