Does anyone have any information on Miller's experiment that made him propose the seven plus or minus two theory in 1956?

-- Rebecca Ann Botwood (RAABOT@aol.com), March 19, 2001

Answers

I do not believe that it was any one experiment. When you read Miller's classic paper(Psychological Review, 1956, 63, 81-97)he referred to several experiments by various investigators, and he only cited one on which he was an author (co-author actually). It is not my impression that the self-publication he cited was especially necessary to his thesis. Read the opening paragraph for a sense that the number seven just seem to recur to him in a variety of circumstances that he bagn to wonder whether there was a common basis for it. However, I have not studied the matter carefully, and I may be missing something critical.

-- Roger K. Thomas (rkthomas@uga.edu), March 19, 2001.