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The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two
"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. It was written by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Harvard University's Department of Psychology and published in 1956 in ''Psychological Review''. It is often interpreted to argue that the number of objects an average human can hold in short-term memory is 7 ± 2. This has occasionally been referred to as '' Miller's law''. Miller's article In his article, Miller discussed a coincidence between the limits of one-dimensional absolute judgment and the limits of short-term memory. In a one-dimensional absolute-judgment task, a person is presented with a number of stimuli that vary on one dimension (e.g., 10 different tones varying only in pitch) and responds to each stimulus with a corresponding response (learned before). Performance is nearly perfect up to five or six different stimuli but declines as the num ...
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Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics. History Philosophically, ruminations on the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks. In 387 BCE, Plato had suggested that the brain was the seat of the mental processes. In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans are born with innate ideas and ...
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Oliver Sacks
Oliver Wolf Sacks (9 July 1933 – 30 August 2015) was a British neurology, neurologist, Natural history, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. Born in London, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at UCSF Medical Center, Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Later, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica epidemic, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. His treatment of those patients became the basis of his 1973 book ''Awakenings (book), Awakenings'', which was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated Awakenings, feature film, in 1990, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. His ...
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Working Memory
Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can Memory, hold information temporarily. It is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information. Working memory is a theoretical concept central to cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience. History The term "working memory" was coined by George Armitage Miller, Miller, Eugene Galanter, Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, Pribram, and was used in the 1960s in the context of Computational theory of mind, theories that likened the mind to a computer. In 1968, Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model, Atkinson and Shiffrin used the term to describe their "short-term store". The term short-term store was the na ...
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Free Recall
Free recall is a common task in the psychological study of memory. In this task, participants study a list of items on each trial, and then are prompted to recall the items in any order. Items are usually presented one at a time for a short duration, and can be any of a number of nameable materials, although traditionally, words from a larger set are chosen. The recall period typically lasts a few minutes, and can involve spoken or written recall. The standard test involves the recall period starting immediately after the final list item; this can be referred to as immediate free recall (IFR) to distinguish it from delayed free recall (DFR). In delayed free recall, there is a short distraction period between the final list item and the start of the recall period. Both IFR and DFR have been used to test certain effects that appear during recall tests, such as the primacy effect and recency effect. Methodology used in measuring performance One of the basic measures of perfor ...
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Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hinduism, Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Watts gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley, California. He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the Beat Generation and the emerging Counterculture of the 1960s, counterculture to ''The Way of Zen'' (1957), one of the first best selling books on Buddhism. In ''Psychotherapy East and West'' (1961), he argued that psychotherapy could become the West's way of liberation if it discarded Dualism (philosophy of mind), dualism, as the Eastern ways do. He considered ''Nature, Man and Woman'' (1958) to be, "from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written". He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in wor ...
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Forgetting Curve
The forgetting curve hypothesizes the decline of memory retention in time. This curve shows how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it. A related concept is the strength of memory that refers to the durability that memory traces in the Human brain, brain. The stronger the memory, the longer period of time that a person is able to recall it. A typical graph of a function, graph of the forgetting curve purports to show that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material. The forgetting curve supports one of the seven kinds of memory failure discussed in The Seven Sins of Memory: transience, which is the process of forgetting that occurs with the passage of time. History From 1880 to 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus ran a limited, incomplete study on himself and published his hypothesis in 1885 as ' (later translated into English as ''Memory: A Contribution to Expe ...
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Fitts's Law
Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics. The law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of ''pointing'', either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was initially developed by Paul Fitts. Fitts's law has been shown to apply under a variety of conditions; with many different limbs (hands, feet, the lower lip, head-mounted sights), manipulanda (input devices), physical environments (including underwater), and user populations (young, old, special educational needs, and drugged participants). Original model formulation The original 1954 paper by Paul Morris Fitts proposed a metric to quantify the difficulty of a target se ...
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Cognitive Dimensions Of Notations
Cognitive dimensions or cognitive dimensions of notations are design principles for notations, user interfaces and programming languages, described by researcher Thomas R.G. Green and further researched with Marian Petre. The dimensions can be used to evaluate the usability of an existing ''information artifact'', or as heuristics to guide the design of a new one, and are useful in Human-Computer Interaction design. Cognitive dimensions are designed to provide a lightweight approach to analyse the quality of a design, rather than an in-depth, detailed description. They provide a common vocabulary for discussing many factors in notation, UI or programming language design. Also, cognitive dimensions help in exploring the space of possible designs through ''design maneuvers'', changes intended to improve the design along one dimension. List of the cognitive dimensions Thomas Green originally defined 14 cognitive dimensions: ; Abstraction gradient : What are the minimum and maximu ...
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Baddeley's Model Of Working Memory
Baddeley's model of working memory is a model of human memory proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974, in an attempt to present a more accurate model of primary memory (often referred to as short-term memory). Working memory splits primary memory into multiple components, rather than considering it to be a single, unified construct. Baddeley and Hitch proposed their three-part working memory model as an alternative to the short-term store in Atkinson and Shiffrin's 'multi-store' memory model (1968). This model is later expanded upon by Baddeley and other co-workers to add a fourth component, and has become the dominant view in the field of working memory. However, alternative models are developing, providing a different perspective on the working memory system. The original model of Baddeley & Hitch was composed of three main components: the ''central executive'' which acts as a supervisory system and controls the flow of information from and to its ''slave systems' ...
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Brunel University London
Brunel University of London (BUL) is a Public university, public Research universities, research university located in the Uxbridge area of London, England. It is named after Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a Victorian era, Victorian engineer and pioneer of the Industrial Revolution. It became a university in June 1966, when Brunel College of Advanced Technology was awarded a royal charter and became Brunel University; it is sometimes considered a plate glass university. In 2014 the university formally adopted the name Brunel University London, and in 2024 became the University of London's 17th member, adopting the trading name Brunel University of London. Since 2014 the university has been organised into three colleges: the College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences; the College of Engineering, Design and Physical Sciences; and the College of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences. Brunel has over 16,000 students and 2,200 staff, and an annual income of £271.3 million (2021–22) ...
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The Australian
''The Australian'', with its Saturday edition ''The Weekend Australian'', is a broadsheet daily newspaper published by News Corp Australia since 14 July 1964. As the only Australian daily newspaper distributed nationally, its readership of both print and online editions was 2,394,000. Its editorial line has been self-described over time as centre-right. Mitchell, Chris (9 March 2006)The Media Report. Australian Broadcasting Company. Parent companies ''The Australian'' is published by News Corp Australia, an asset of News Corp, which also owns the sole daily newspapers in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin, and the most circulated metropolitan daily newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne. News Corp's chairman and founder is Rupert Murdoch. ''The Australian'' integrates content from overseas newspapers owned by News Corp Australia's international parent News Corp, including ''The Wall Street Journal'' and ''The Times'' of London. History The first edition of ''Th ...
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