The art of thinking · 3 · Memory
Chunking (working memory)
Also known as: Chunking (cognitive psychology), Recoding
German: Chunking
In cognitive psychology, chunking is the grouping of separate items into larger meaningful units (chunks) on the basis of knowledge in long-term memory, so that more information can be held and processed within the limits of working memory.
- Cognitive psychology
- Memory
- Learning
In one sentence
In memory research, chunking is grouping items into larger meaningful units so that more fits into working memory (Miller 1956; Chase and Simon 1973).
Example
A new service technician reads an error code “E 0 4 7 1” as five characters; an experienced one reads “E047, drive overtemperature, axis 1” — two familiar units.
What the research shows
George A. Miller (1956) argued that the span of immediate memory is limited in chunks rather than in bits, and that recoding — for example reading binary digits as octal numbers — lets people hold far more information. William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon (1973) built on Adriaan de Groot's chess studies: masters reproduced briefly shown game positions far better than weaker players, but not random positions, because they perceived familiar configurations of pieces as units. Fernand Gobet and colleagues (2001) distinguished deliberate, strategic chunking from automatic, perceptual chunking during learning and modeled both.
Evidence status
Chunking is well established and central to the explanation of expertise: experts have more and larger chunks in their domain, and the advantage disappears when the material is not meaningful to them. What counts as one chunk depends on the person's knowledge, so chunk counts are hard to measure independently of the person. This sense of chunking is distinct from two others used on this site: Chunking in the AI glossary is the splitting of text into passages for retrieval, and chunking in information design (for example in Information Mapping, Robert E. Horn's method) is the dividing of a document into small units. Neither is a synonym of the memory process; they only share the word.
How it applies
What a reader can take in as one unit depends on what the reader already knows; a sequence that is one chunk for an expert can be many items for a novice. The glossary “Applied cognitive psychology for information use” covers the design side, and the expertise reversal effect explains why guidance for novices can hinder experts. Dividing a text into small sections does not by itself create chunks in a reader's memory.
External references
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