In short, says Miller, "the scare" led to an even deeper confirmation of the phenomenon: the magical number was 7, all right, but seven chunks, not just seven items. Moreover, he says, this recognition of chunking was what finally led him to make an open break with Skinner and company. Not only did the data prove the existence of mental states—namely, concepts in memory—but they showed that these mental states have structure. Indeed, says Miller, chunking implied that our minds are capable of organizing whole hierarchies of data: each chunk in short-term memory can hold several pieces of
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