Short-term memory has a limited capacity of about seven plus or minus two pieces of
information. Chunking allows people to combine many small pieces of information into fewer,
bigger pieces of information. As long as people have fewer than about nine chunks of
information, they will probably be able to hold that information in short-term memory.
Retroactive interference is the forgetting of old information when new information
is learned. An example: Frank learned Spanish in high school. Since he took French 101 in
college, however, he can’t remember very much of his Spanish.