EVER suffer from memory overload? It’s a common problem because adults can only hold three things in their working memories at a time. We expand this pitiful capacity by grouping things into hierarchical categories – we remember phone numbers in clusters of numerals, for instance.
You might think we learn this technique as we mature. Not a bit of it. Babies also remember only three things at a time, and they get past the limitation by categorising.
Lisa Feigenson and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, showed 14-month-old babies four toys, then hid them in a box where the…
