How was the research conducted?
Digit Span Technique - requires participants to hear/read a set of random digits and repeat them in the same order (Serial Recall). List of digits start at 4 and get longer each time until the participant can no longer recall them correctly. At this point, it represents the capacity of their STM.
What did the research show?
Jacobs - suggested the capacity of STM is limited to 5-9 items. When new information is received by the STM, it pushes out old information (Displacement).
He concluded that STM has limited capacity and that when our STM reaches this limit, new information displaces the old information.
Miller (Similar Research) - found the "Magic Number 7". Generally people can hold 7 + or - 2 pieces of information. Miller claimed the rule applies to words aswell as numbers. Also argued that our STM can be increased through "chunking" meaning if we chunk information into meaningful groups we can hold more information into our STM
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