ABSTRACT
It is undeniable that, in many ordinary situations, people are able to recall about seven items. Therefore, it is not surprising that Miller's casual estimate of capacity limits was a hit. It has been used in quite recent work on capacity limits, such as Lisman and Idiart's neural model of short-term memory limits. Some theorists resisted a reassessment of capacity limits by Cowan. Notably, Pascual-Leone stuck to the original estimate of about seven items. His grounds for doing so had to do with the need to account for processing and storage. His general view was that processing and storage in working memory come from a common resource. A critic might still suggest that running span involves a continual updating process. The subject might continually add the most recent item to the list held in working memory and drop the least recent. The multiple-capacities view could challenge the nature of capacity limits without challenging an empirical generalization.
