Chunking is used in cognitive science to refer to the way that groups of items can be tretaed as a single unit (a chunk). This occurs in short-term memory, where it is a lot eaiser to remember 5 words than 30 random letters. Chunking is also used to refer to the active process whereby frequent groups of stiumuli, patterns of thought or well practiced movements become treated as a single chunk. This can be emulated in computational cognitive architectures including in SOAR.
Defined on pages 527, 529
Used on pages 527, 529