Our memory and its capacity

There is a limit on the amount of information that a person is able to receive, process, and remember. The first part of an individual receiving the information goes in the form of recoding. Recoding is a very important process in human psychology and Miller believes that it deserves a much more explicit attention than it has received. He goes on to say that the kind of linguistic recoding that people engage in seems to him to be the very lifeblood of the thought process because that is where it all begins. Recoding, he says, is a constant concern to clinicians, social psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists because it is less accessible to experimental manipulation but through experimental techniques, methods of recoding can be specified and behavioral indications can be found.
The concepts and measures used in the experiment provided readers with some information. There is a clear and definite limit to the accuracy with which people can identify absolutely the magnitude of a unidimesional stimulus variable, which is the amount of information one can recall in a short period of time. Miller called the limit the span of absolute judgment. He said that for unidimensional judgments, the span of absolute judgment span is usually somewhere in the neighborhood of seven.
He proposes that there is a way of getting around the accuracy of judgment which revolves around the neighborhood of seven. We can increase the accuracy of our judgment, which is, the amount of information we are able to recall in the short term, by using a variety of techniques that will help one get around it and therefore increasing the accuracy of one’s judgment. The three of the most important devices are first, to make relative rather than absolute judgments. Or if that is not possible, to increase the number of dimensions along which the stimuli can differ; this might include mnemonic processes. Or to arrange the task in such a way that one can make a sequence of several absolute judgments in row. He says that by adding these dimensions one can extend the span of their absolute judgment from seven to at least 150. The span of absolute judgment is once again the amount of information one can remember over a short period of time.

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