Psychologist Alan Baddeley questioned the seven plus or minus two rule. Baddeley
(1994) dug up Miller’s paper and discovered that it wasn’t a paper describing actual
research; it was a talk that Miller gave at a professional meeting. And it was basically
Miller thinking out loud about whether there is some kind of inherent limit to the
amount of information that people can process at a time.
Baddeley (1986) conducted a long series of studies on human memory and information
processing. Others, including Nelson Cowan (2001), folllowed in his footsteps. The
research now shows that the “magical” number is four