George Armitage Miller
George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012)[1] was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.
George Armitage Miller
February 3, 1920
July 22, 2012 (aged 92)
- Contributions to Cognitive Psychology and Science
- The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
- Directing WordNet
- Princeton University
- Harvard University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Rockefeller University
- Oxford University
- University of Alabama
- American Psychological Association
Optimal Design of Jamming Signals (1946)
Miller began his career when the reigning theory in psychology was behaviorism, which eschewed the study of mental processes and focused on observable behavior. Rejecting this approach, Miller devised experimental techniques and mathematical methods to analyze mental processes, focusing particularly on speech and language. Working mostly at Harvard University, MIT and Princeton University, he went on to become one of the founders of psycholinguistics and was one of the key figures in founding the broader new field of cognitive science, c. 1978. He collaborated and co-authored work with other figures in cognitive science and psycholinguistics, such as Noam Chomsky. For moving psychology into the realm of mental processes and for aligning that move with information theory, computation theory, and linguistics, Miller is considered one of the great twentieth-century psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Miller as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era.[2]
Legacy[edit]
The Cognitive Neuroscience Society established a George A. Miller Prize in 1995 for contributions to the field.[31] The American Psychological Association established a George A. Miller Award in 1995 for an outstanding article on general psychology.[32] From 1987 the department of psychology at Princeton University has presented the George A. Miller prize annually to the best interdisciplinary senior thesis in cognitive science.[33] The paper on the magical number seven continues to be cited by both the popular press to explain the liking for seven-digit phone numbers and to argue against nine-digit zip codes, and by academia, especially modern psychology, to highlight its break with the behaviorist paradigm.[1]
Miller was considered the 20th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century in a list[34] republished by, among others, the American Psychological Association.[35]