The boundaries, the influences on, and consequences of a short-term memory (STM) capacity of 4 leads us to consider global versus local processing. We argue that in schizophrenia cognitive problems can lie partly in pre-conscious automatic selective attention and partly with the speed of processing in later controlled processes (including compound STM). The influence of automatic attentional mechanisms may be under-estimated in normal psychology and explain the loss of the magic 4 in schizophrenia.