Visual Chunk

I think the term was introduced in George A. Miller's 1956 paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information .” Here's a quote:

> “A man just beginning to learn [Morse] code hears each dit and dah as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves as words, which are still larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases. I do not mean that each step is a discrete process, or that plateaus must appear in his learning curve, for surely the levels of organization are achieved at different rates and overlap each other during the learning process. I am simply pointing to the obvious fact that the dits and dahs are organized by learning into patterns and that as these larger chunks emerge the amount of message that the operator can remember increases correspondingly.”

Now consider this image, Royce70 Diagram 7:

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There are two visual chunks created because of the organization of the boxes into rows. (The lower chunk is stronger, but the upper gets a cumulative strength from being repeated in most all the figures.)