George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) 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.
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.
Miller was born on February 3, 1920, in Charleston, West Virginia, the son of George E. Miller, a steel company executive and Florence (née Armitage) Miller. Soon after his birth, his parents divorced, and he lived with his mother during the Great Depression, attending public school and graduating from Charleston High School in 1937. He moved with his mother and stepfather to Washington, D.C., and attended George Washington University for a year. His family practiced Christian Science, which required turning to prayer, rather than medical science, for healing. After his stepfather was transferred to Birmingham, Alabama, Miller transferred to the University of Alabama.
Miller received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in history and speech in 1940 and a Master of Arts in speech in 1941 from the University of Alabama. He received a Master of Arts in psychology in 1944 and a Doctor of Philosophy in psychology in 1946 from Harvard University.
When he was at the University of Alabama, membership in the Drama club had fostered his interest in courses in the Speech Department. He was also influenced by Professor Donald Ramsdell, who introduced him to psychology. Later, as a graduate student at Harvard University, he worked in Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, under the supervision of Stanley Smith Stevens, researching military voice communications for the Army Signal Corps during World War II. He received his doctorate in 1946; his doctoral thesis, "The Optimal Design of Jamming Signals," was classified top secret by the US Army.
After receiving his doctorate, Miller stayed at Harvard as a research fellow, continuing his research on speech and hearing. He was appointed an assistant professor of psychology in 1948. The course he developed on language and communication eventually led to his first major book, Language and communication (1951). He took a sabbatical in 1950, and spent a year as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, to pursue his interest in mathematics. Miller befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer, with whom he played squash. In 1951, Miller joined MIT as an associate professor of psychology. He led the psychology group at the MIT Lincoln Lab and worked on voice communication and human engineering. A notable outcome of this research was his identification of the minimal voice features of speech required for it to be intelligible. Based on this work, in 1955, he was invited to talk at the Eastern Psychological Association. That presentation, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two", was later published as a paper which went on to be a legendary one in cognitive psychology.
Miller moved back to Harvard as a tenured associate professor in 1955 and became a full professor in 1958, expanding his research into how language affects human cognition. At the university, he met a young Noam Chomsky, another of the founders of cognitive science. They spent a summer together at Stanford, where their two families shared a house. In 1958–59, Miller took leave to join the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California, (now at Stanford University). There he collaborated with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram on the book Plans and the Structure of Behavior. In 1960, along with Jerome S. Bruner, he co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. The cognitive term was a break from the then-dominant school of behaviorism, which insisted cognition was not fit for scientific study. The center attracted such notable visitors as Jean Piaget, Alexander Luria and Chomsky. Miller then became the chair of the psychology department. Miller was instrumental at the time for recruiting Timothy Leary to teach at Harvard. Miller knew Leary from the University of Alabama, where Miller was teaching psychology and Leary graduated with an undergraduate degree from the department.
In 1967, Miller taught at Rockefeller University for a year, as a visiting professor, From 1968 to 1979, he was Professor at the Rockefeller and continued as adjunct professor there from 1979 to 1982. Following the election of a new president at Rockefeller Miller moved to Princeton University as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology. At Princeton he helped to found (in 1986) the Cognitive Science Laboratory, and also directed the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Science.. Eventually, he became a professor emeritus and senior research psychologist at Princeton.
In his later years, Miller enjoyed playing golf. He died in 2012 at his home in Plainsboro, New Jersey of complications of pneumonia and dementia. At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife Margaret; the children from his first marriage: son Donnally James and daughter Nancy Saunders; two stepsons, David Skutch and Christopher Skutch; and three grandchildren: Gavin Murray-Miller, Morgan Murray-Miller and Nathaniel James Miller.
Miller began his career in a period during which behaviorism dominated research psychology. It was argued that observable processes are the proper subject matter of science, that behavior is observable and mental processes are not. Thus, mental processes were not a fit topic for study. Miller disagreed. He and others such Jerome Bruner and Noam Chomsky founded the field of Cognitive Psychology, which accepted the study of mental processes as fundamental to an understanding of complex behavior. In succeeding years, this cognitive approach largely replaced behaviorism as the framework governing research in psychology.
From the days of William James, psychologists had distinguished short-term from long-term memory. While short-term memory seemed to be limited, its limits were not known. In 1956, Miller put a number on that limit in the paper "The magical number seven, plus or minus two". He derived this number from tasks such as asking a person to repeat a set of digits, presenting a stimulus and a label and requiring recall of the label, or asking the person to quickly count things in a group. In all three cases, Miller found the average limit to be seven items. He later had mixed feelings about this work, feeling that it had often been misquoted, and he jokingly suggested that he was being persecuted by an integer. Miller invented the term chunk to characterize the way that individuals could cope with this limitation on memory, effectively reducing the number of elements by grouping them. A chunk might be a single letter or a familiar word or even a larger familiar unit. These and related ideas strongly influenced the budding field of cognitive psychology.