It is commonly misunderstood what STM is capable of. It is nowadays known that STM is crap on many levels and can only hold around around 3 items, and unreliabl

It is commonly misunderstood what STM is capable of. It is nowadays known that STM is crap on many levels and can only hold around around 3 items, and unreliably at that. Certainly not 7 as was proposed earlier. Anything beyond that goes into LTM. It takes around 5 seconds to put something into LTM. If the test talked about here has more than 3 things to remember, LTM must be in use and will be a limiting factor. Any differences between people at that point likely refer to their chunking capabilities, i.e. if they can reduce complex patterns to a single entity to remember (each of which takes ~5 seconds). Source: Human Problem Solving by Newell/Simon.