List-length effect

Biological Parallel

Working memory constraints are universal. Honeybee flower constancy decays after 3-4 seconds between visits. Bumblebee foraging accuracy collapses as flower species diversity increases. Clark's nutcrackers cache 33,000 seeds but recall degrades systematically with count. Scrub jay cache-monitoring capacity shrinks as total caches grow. The mechanism is attention dilution: total encoding resources stay constant while competing items multiply, forcing depth-breadth trade-offs at every scale.