Does anyone know *why* working memory is limited to 7-9 chunks? If it were 20, would something stop working?
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i think at some point you get overwhelmed by the combinatorial explosion of the different possible things you can do with the chunks. i have no idea where that limit is
My guess is the same, since what is working memory if not the ability to manipulate and combine the objects you have in mind. 7 objects means 21 pairwise interactions, or 128 n-ary interactions.
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Yeah 7 and 10 feel very similar but when you think about combinations they are multiple orders of magnitude apart