Cognitive Scaffold

Preparing your thinking workspace

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MENTAL MODEL · M6470

Miller's Law

Miller's Law
Learn & MetacognitionHigh supportCognitive Psychology
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Updated 2026-08-08

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

Miller's law states that the number of objects an average person can hold in working memory is about seven, give or take two. The unit that matters is the chunk rather than the raw item, and chunking lets people carry far more information by grouping elements into meaningful units. The limit is therefore not a fixed count of facts but a constraint on how many distinct units can be active at once. Practical design follows: present information in grouped, labelled sets and offload the rest to external memory.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Count the units: estimate how many distinct chunks a person must hold at once. - Group before presenting: bundle related items into labelled categories of a few each. - Offload the rest: push overflow into checklists, menus or notes rather than memory.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Working memory can keep only a small number of distinct units active at once, and each unit beyond that limit is either dropped or confused with another. Chunking works because a meaningful group is stored as a single unit, so a familiar category can carry several items at the cost of one slot. Expertise therefore expands capacity without changing the underlying limit: the expert simply has larger and better-organised chunks. Design that respects the limit reduces errors, while design that ignores it produces overload and omission.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Practice this model in one real situation:

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Source support: Explicit

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    en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller's_lawZH · Explicit
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