Hi Oliver, Take a look at George Miller's 1956 study "The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two."
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/ Miller was studying the human ability to distinguish values along unidimensional and multi-dimensional scales. Things related to color, sound and taste for example. Basically, he found that most people have the ability to reliably distinguish (by memory) about seven variations on any particular scale. Some people are better or worse at this, so the range is generally between five and nine variations. For example, most people can distinguish around seven musical tones on a scale and identify them when played without making mistakes. With color it's not as clear-cut since colors often vary along multiple dimensions (hue, value and satuation) but given a set of colors that vary only along a single axis people in a psychology experiment could, on average, distinguish about seven different variations. Color distinctions are also culturally derived, so that'll play into how many color variations students are able to recognize. I'm not familiar with research into shape distinctions, but the first idea that popped into my head was to look at shape sorter toys for inspiration: http://images.google.com/images?q=shape sorter toy They range from three (circle, square, triangle) to 18 different shapes, depending on the target age. // jeff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=24096 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
