George Armitage Miller
| George Armitage Miller | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
February 3, 1920 Charleston, West Virginia |
| Died | July 22, 2012 (aged 92) Plainsboro, New Jersey |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Psychology, Cognitive Science |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | Harvard University, University of Alabama |
| Thesis | Optimal Design of Jamming Signals (1946) |
| Doctoral advisor | Stanley Smith Stevens |
| Notable students | George Sperling, Ulric Neisser |
| Known for |
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| Notable awards |
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George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of the cognitive psychology field. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics and cognitive science in general. 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 insightfully 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 in both psychology and the wider culture. He also won awards, such as the National Medal of Science.
Miller started his education focusing on speech and language and published papers on these topics, focusing on mathematical, computational and psychological aspects of the field. He started his career at a time when the reigning theory in psychology was behaviorism, which eschewed any attempt to study mental processes and focused only on observable behavior. Working mostly at Harvard University, MIT and Princeton University, Miller introduced experimental techniques to study the psychology of mental processes. He went on to be one of the founders of psycholinguistics and was then one of the key figures in founding the broader new field of cognitive science, circa 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.
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