George A. Miller
The first concept introduced by Miller is known as chunking. Chunking is a way developed to help people remember a certain number of words or numbers. It is known to help with both short-term memory and long-term memory. When he asked subjects to perform memory tasks in various experiments, he noticed that most subjects recalled about seven units from a list regardless of the list topic. Miller said that the short-term memory could only hold 5-9 chunks of information (plus or minus two) and is also a way to increase the capacity of short-term memory. A chunk can refer to digits, words, faces, or any type of meaningful unit. Chunking is when a person groups multiple words together to help with memory tasks. This technique can help people with recalling specific groups of words. Remembering is much easier when the chunking technique is used. An example of chunking would be trying to remember a long sequence of digits. For example, 2 4 5 6 1 4 2 7 0 could be remembered by chunking those numbers into smaller meaningful units such as 245 614 270.