1 The seminal work on short-term memory limits is “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” by George Miller, The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, p. 81–97. As made evident by the title of Miller’s paper, his original estimate for short-term memory capacity was 7 ± 2 chunks.
2 A readable contemporary reference is Human Memory: Theory and Practice by Alan Baddeley, Allyn & Bacon, 1997. Regarding short-term memory limits, see, for example, “The Magical Number Four in Short-Term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity” by Nelson Cowan, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2001, vol. 24, p. 87–114.
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