C/PS/39. "Chunking" and short-term memory capacity

A study was conducted to assess the effects of chunking upon short-term memory capacity. Participants were presented with two sets of 12 letter trigrams where the letters either formed chunks or were random, after each set of trigrams participants were asked to recall as many of the trigrams as possible. Based on previous research it was hypothesised that meaningful trigrams would be better recalled than random letter trigrams. The results obtained supported this hypothesis.