Much of what we know about how memory works comes from a classic psychological study from the 1950s.  That study showed that humans can remember about six or seven things at a time.

"That estimate comes from real world types of tests where the subject can use any technique or strategy that they could think of to do the task," said Nelson Cowan of the MU Psychology dept. "This typically involves grouping items together and it involves rehearsing them, saying them silently to oneself."

Now University of Missouri researchers are changing the way we think about memory.

A pair of researchers used a computer program involving colored squares to discover how much we can hold in our simplest form of memory, without relying on the usual strategies.

"In this task, what we asked people to do stripped away those abilities to draw those relationships and so what's left is the underlying pure dynamics." said Jeff Rouder of the MU psychology dept. 

Rouder and Cowan studied undergraduate students at MU for over two years.

In order to test the study for ourselves, we went to Patricia's Foods and gave customers a list of six grocery items including eggs to see how many items they could remember.

"According to my wife, it's pretty bad," said customer Jonathan Armistead. 

And pretty bad is how  Armistead describes his memory as well.

He estimated that he'd be able to remember between 4 and 6 items on our list, and he wasn't far off.

"Cheese, pencil, pear...eggs...that's all I got,"said Armistead.

Psychology is everywhere... Even at the supermarket.

The researchers are currently working on repeating their study with children.