 People have more difficulty recalling the string of letters BIC, IAJ, FKI, RSU and SAF than FBI, CIA, JFK, IRS and USA.
The well-established reason is that the amount of information we can hold in our short-term or working memory is affected by whether the information can be "chunked" into larger units.
New research takes this learning principle one step further by uncovering how the strength - or familiarity - of those chunks plays a crucial role.
"We are suggesting that working memory capacity is not a fixed quantity but interacts with the familiarity of the elements that need to be processed," said Lynne Reder, professor of psychology.
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