# Chunking: Increasing The Capacity of STM

The digit span experiment you just tried suggests that people can store, on average, seven bits of information in their STM at one time. Is it possible to increase this capacity?

Here is an example of how more information can be stored in STM. Consider the following list of twelve digits:

- 1,0,6,6,1,4,9,2,1,9,4,5

The twelve bits of information in this list would normally be two much for STM to store all at once. However, we can process this list in a different way:

- ten sixty six
- fourteen ninety two
- nineteen fourty five

If we treat each set of four digits as a date, we reduce the number of bits of information from twelve to three, which is well within the capacity of STM. Combining several bits of information into one is called chunking.

In the example above, chunking is made easier for some people because the dates are significant (the Battle of Hastings, Columbus sails to America, the end of World War Two). This makes the digits easier to recall, because they have additional meaning. Obviously, this only works if the person knows the significance of the dates. Chunking can increase the overall amount of information stored in STM at one time. However, you can still only store seven chunks of information.

This experiment suggests that the capacity of STM is increased if information is combined into chunks. Next Section

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