Periodically, people repeat the myth that readers can only handle lists with 7 plus or minus 2 items.
Some postings about this subject:
"7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person's capacity to comprehend printed text."
"[The point of the article is] that we have ways of overcoming these limits on how much information we can take in at once , and that doing so is commonplace and of tremendous importance in explaining how humans are able to do the many spectacular things that they can do.
Anyone who thinks that people can't handle more than 7 +/- 2 chunks of information in a single 'list' simply isn't paying attention."
http://listserv.okstate.edu/CGI/WA.EXE?A2=ind9905a&L=techwr-l&F=&S=&P=30746
"It makes John Hayes see red when I come home from conferences and tell him that I heard once again one of the following: No more than 7 bullets on an overhead, 7 steps in a procedure, 7 items in a list, 7 paragraphs on a page, or 7 rule lines on a page!!!! I keep telling him that he and Herb Simon should co-author an article and set the record straight on a number of issues.... They just laugh at the idea of needing to set the record straight because they can't believe anyone would extend research on memorizing nonsense syllables ... to making guidelines for document design.... [T]he number 7 research is not relevant to document design and has nothing to do with how people comprehend documents or any printed text for that matter."
http://listserv.okstate.edu/CGI/WA.EXE?A2=ind9808b&L=techwr-l&F=&S=&P=32281
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