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details, there is a general agreement that working memory capacity is very limited, and that this limitation
is a key feature of the human cognitive system.
4.1.3 Chunking and automation help overcome the limitations of working memory
How can we accomplish anything at all sophisticated with such a limited working memory? The answer,
according to cognitive psychology, lies in the mechanisms of chunking information (Miller, 1956) and
automation of processing (Schneider and Shiffrin, 1977).
To remember a phone number or date, we do not memorize a sequence of individual integers such
as 0-4-0-0-5-1-5-3-8-8 or 0-6-0-3-2-0-1-0, but group the integers so that they form bigger chunks: 0400-
515-388 or 06-03-2010. Chunks often, but not always, carry meaning on their own (e.g., month, operator
code). A chunk, although composite, can be treated as a single item by working memory, allowing
us to process larger amounts of information simultaneously. As we become increasingly familiar with
information, we process it increasingly automatically, without paying attention to its components and
without having to use our working memory. Tuovinen (2000) uses fluent readers as an example: “they
do not try to read out individual letters, but process larger groups, words or groups of words, without
attending to individual letters or even words separately.”
What does this mean for learning? We learn something when we store it in long-term memory.
Working memory is a bottleneck that limits our access to long-term memory. Cognitive science suggests
that increasing one’s ability to deal with information in large chunks and ever more automatically is key
to learning and the growth of expertise. The following sections elaborate on this claim.
4.2 We store our generic knowledge as schemas
Schemas represent knowledge as stable patterns of relationships between elements describing
some classes of structures that are abstracted from specific instances and used to categorize
such instances. (Kalyuga, 2010, p. 48)
A schema is a mental structure that contains generic conceptual knowledge (see, e.g., Rumelhart and
Ortony, 1977; Rumelhart and Norman, 1978; Rumelhart, 1980; Anderson, 1977; Kalyuga, 2010). People
make use of schemas constantly, both as they reason about everyday objects and situations, and as they
solve problems. A person can have a schema of what a house is, of what going to a restaurant typically
involves, or of how to write a program that computes an average of given numbers. A schema of houses,
for example, may include the knowledge that a house is a type of building, that it consists of rooms, has
walls and windows, is typically made of wood, brick, or stone, probably has a rectilinear shape, normally
functions as a human dwelling, and is likely to be between 100 and 10,000 square feet in size (example
from Anderson, 2009, pp. 134–135).
A schema contains knowledge of the stereotypical properties and parts of the concept, process, or
situation it represents. The properties of a schema may involve other schemas, creating hierarchical
structures or networks of schemas; the concept of house is linked to the concepts of walls and windows,
for instance. Schemas may link to themselves as well, forming recursive structures (see, e.g., Rumelhart
and Ortony, 1977). Schemas reside in long-term memory; the human mind is capable of storing countless
complex schemas.
A generic schema allows us to make inferences about specific instances. For example, if someone
speaks of their own house, we can – and do – fairly safely assume certain things about it, such as its shape
(but we may be wrong, too). A schema “determines expectancies, organizes encoding, and systematically
distorts retrieval [of knowledge from memory] in the direction of internal consistency.” (Hintzman, 1986,
p. 424). Schemas do allow for unusual properties in specific instances. If we see a house made of glass,
we can still easily consider it a house, albeit untypical. Just how untypical an instance is allowed to be
to still be considered a member of a schema-based category depends on the schema and the individual,
and possibly even the time of day, as people do not always categorize instances consistently (see, e.g.,
Anderson, 2009, p. 136–138).
Schemas are created, extended, and modified through experience. Schema theorists vary on the
details, but they all make the same central claim: previously existing schemas in long-term memory
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