There is a limit to the amount of information that can be held in the short-term store: 75 ±- 29 [[Chunking (psychology)|chunks]].<ref name=Miller1956 /> These chunks, which were noted by Miller in his seminal paper ''The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two'', are defined as independent items of information. It is important to note that some chunks are perceived as one unit though they could be broken down into multiple items, for example "1066" can be either the series of four digits "1, 0, 6, 6" or the semantically grouped item "1066" which is the year the [[Battle of Hastings]] was fought. [[Chunking (psychology)|Chunking]] allows for large amounts of information to be held in memory: 149283141066 is twelve individual items, well outside the limit of the short-term store, but it can be grouped semantically into the 4 chunks "[[Christopher Columbus|Columbus]][1492] ate[8] pie[314→3.14→[[pi|{{pi}}]]] at the [[Battle of Hastings]][1066]". Because short-term memory is limited in capacity, it severely limits the amount of information that can be attended to at any one time.
