George A. Miller
American psychologist of memory, language and cognition
American psychologist who worked at Harvard, MIT, Rockefeller and Princeton. His 1956 paper on the limits of absolute judgement and immediate memory described chunking, and he co-founded Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies with Jerome Bruner.
Why this person matters
Miller's 1956 paper gave students a simple way to talk about limited memory capacity and the recoding of information into chunks. Through the Center for Cognitive Studies, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with Galanter and Pribram) and later WordNet, he worked with many collaborators to move psychology towards language and information processing.
Main contributions
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
Published in Psychological Review in 1956 while he was at Harvard. Miller argued that absolute judgement is limited by the amount of information, while immediate memory is limited by the number of items, usually about seven. Recoding input into larger chunks extends what can be remembered.
Plans and the Structure of Behavior
Written in 1960 with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram. The book proposed the TOTE unit (test, operate, test, exit) as a building block of behaviour, in place of accounts based only on stimulus and response.
Institutions and WordNet
In 1960 he co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Jerome Bruner. From 1986 he directed the development of WordNet, a lexical database organised into sets of synonyms, with a team that included Christiane Fellbaum.
Context and limits
Miller worked with others throughout, including Bruner at the Center and Galanter and Pribram on Plans. Charles Osgood and Peter Milner published critical reviews of Language and Communication and Plans and the Structure of Behavior respectively. In the 1956 paper Miller himself wondered whether the recurring seven was meaningful or "only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence". The figure is now usually quoted as an approximate average, not a fixed limit.
In your introductory course
Memory.Appears in the memory chapter wherever short-term memory capacity and chunking are taught. The number seven is usually quoted as an average, not a fixed limit.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 8.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1951
Published Language and Communication while at MIT.
- 1956
Published the span-of-memory paper in Psychological Review (volume 63, pages 81 to 97).
- 1960
Published Plans and the Structure of Behavior and co-founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies.
- 1969
Served as president of the American Psychological Association.
- 1986
Began directing the development of WordNet at Princeton.
Sources
- Classics in the History of Psychology (York University), Miller (1956), The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus TwoOriginal work. Text passages inspected.
- Bangor Daily News, Pioneer of cognitive psychology dies at 92Reference work. Reference article inspected.
- Wikipedia, George Armitage MillerReference work. Reference article inspected.