This particular view of learning is based upon the studies carried out by Dr. Alan Baddeley in the 1960s and 70s. His initial focus was upon the nature of short term, or working memory, leading to the discovery that it is the norm to be able to hold on average seven items in working memory at any one moment. Given that many complex tasks can be broken down into far more than seven constituent parts, it became apparent that many things which humans could learn to accomplish with ease ought to be almost impossible. It was then hypothesized that items in working memory could be processed as chunks – better known as schemas – which could be saved in the long term memory and drawn upon when necessary. In this way, a complex task could be saved as a single schema, while short term memory would be capable of processing up to seven such schemas at any given moment.