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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.
George Armitage Miller | |
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Born | Charleston, West Virginia, US | February 3, 1920
Died | July 22, 2012 Plainsboro, New Jersey, US | (aged 92)
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Psychology, cognitive science |
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Thesis | Optimal Design of Jamming Signals (1946) |
Doctoral advisor | Stanley Smith Stevens |
Notable students | George Sperling, Ulric Neisser |
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.
Biography
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.
At the University of Alabama he took courses in phonetics, voice science, and speech pathology, earning his bachelor's degree in history and speech in 1940, and a master's in a speech in 1941. 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 both to psychology, and, indirectly through a seminar, to his future wife Katherine James. They married on November 29, 1939. Katherine died in January 1996. He married Margaret Ferguson Skutch Page in 2008.
Miller taught the course "Introduction to Psychology" at Alabama for two years. He enrolled in the Ph.D. program in psychology at Harvard University in 1943, after coming to the university in 1942. At Harvard 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.
Career
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.[citation needed]
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.
Miller had honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex (1984), Columbia University (1980), Yale University (1979), Catholic University of Louvain (1978),Carnegie Mellon University (in humane letters, 2003), and an honorary DSC from Williams College (2000). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957, the National Academy of Sciences in 1962, the presidency of the Eastern Psychological Association in 1962, the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1969, the American Philosophical Society in 1971, and to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. Miller was the keynote speaker at the first convention of the Association for Psychological Science in 1989. He was a Fulbright research fellow at Oxford University in 1964–65, and in 1991, received the National Medal of Science.
Death
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.
Major contributions
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.
Working memory
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 been 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.
WordNet
For many years starting from 1986, Miller directed the development of WordNet, a large computer-readable electronic reference usable in applications such as search engines, which was created by a team that included Christiane Fellbaum, among others. Wordnet is a large lexical database representing human semantic memory in English. Its fundamental building block is a synset, which is a collection of synonyms representing a concept or idea. Words can be in multiple synsets. The entire class of synsets is grouped into nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs separately, with links existing only within these four major groups but not between them. Going beyond a thesaurus, WordNet also includes inter-word relationships such as part/whole relationships and hierarchies of inclusion.Although not intended to be a dictionary, Wordnet did have many short definitions added to it as time went on. Miller and colleagues had planned the tool to test psycholinguistic theories on how humans use and understand words. Miller also later worked closely with entrepreneur Jeff Stibel and scientists at Simpli.com Inc., on a meaning-based keyword search engine based on WordNet. Wordnet has proved to be extremely influential on an international scale.[citation needed] It has now been emulated by wordnets in many different languages.[citation needed]
Psychology of language
Miller is one of the founders of psycholinguistics, which links language and cognition in the analysis of language creation and usage. His 1951 book Language and Communication is considered seminal in the field. His later book, The Science of Words (1991) also focused on the psychology of language. Together with Noam Chomsky he published papers on the mathematical and computational aspects of language and its syntax, two new areas of study. Miller also studied the human understanding of words and sentences, a problem also faced by artificial speech-recognition technology. The book Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960), written with Eugene Galanter and Karl H. Pribram, explored how humans plan and act, trying to extrapolate this to how a robot could be programmed to plan and act. Miller is also known for coining Miller's Law: "In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of".
Books
Miller authored several books, many considered the first major works in their respective fields.
Language and Communication, 1951
Miller's Language and Communication was one of the first significant texts in the study of language behavior. The book was a scientific study of language, emphasizing quantitative data, and was based on the mathematical model of Claude Shannon's information theory. It used a probabilistic model imposed on a learning-by-association scheme borrowed from behaviorism, with Miller not yet attached to a pure cognitive perspective. The first part of the book reviewed information theory, the physiology and acoustics of phonetics, speech recognition and comprehension, and statistical techniques to analyze language. The focus was more on speech generation than recognition. The second part had the psychology: idiosyncratic differences across people in language use; developmental linguistics; the structure of word associations in people; use of symbolism in language; and social aspects of language use.
Reviewing the book, Charles E. Osgood classified the book as a graduate-level text based more on objective facts than on theoretical constructs. He thought the book was verbose on some topics and too brief on others not directly related to the author's expertise area. He was also critical of Miller's use of simple, Skinnerian single-stage stimulus-response learning to explain human language acquisition and use. This approach, per Osgood, made it impossible to analyze the concept of meaning, and the idea of language consisting of representational signs. He did find the book objective in its emphasis on facts over theory, and depicting clearly application of information theory to psychology.
Plans and the Structure of Behavior, 1960
In Plans and the Structure of Behavior, Miller and his co-authors tried to explain through an artificial-intelligence computational perspective how animals plan and act. This was a radical break from behaviorism which explained behavior as a set or sequence of stimulus-response actions. The authors introduced a planning element controlling such actions. They saw all plans as being executed based on input using a stored or inherited information of the environment (called the image), and using a strategy called test-operate-test-exit (TOTE). The image was essentially a stored memory of all past context, akin to Tolman's cognitive map. The TOTE strategy, in its initial test phase, compared the input against the image; if there was incongruity the operate function attempted to reduce it. This cycle would be repeated till the incongruity vanished, and then the exit function would be invoked, passing control to another TOTE unit in a hierarchically arranged scheme.
Peter Milner, in a review in the Canadian Journal of Psychology, noted the book was short on concrete details on implementing the TOTE strategy. He also critically viewed the book as not being able to tie its model to details from neurophysiology at a molecular level. Per him, the book covered only the brain at the gross level of , showing that some of its regions could possibly implement some TOTE strategies, without giving a reader an indication as to how the region could implement the strategy.
The Psychology of Communication, 1967
Miller's 1967 work, The Psychology of Communication, was a collection of seven previously published articles. The first "Information and Memory" dealt with chunking, presenting the idea of separating physical length (the number of items presented to be learned) and psychological length (the number of ideas the recipient manages to categorize and summarize the items with). Capacity of short-term memory was measured in units of psychological length, arguing against a pure behaviorist interpretation since meaning of items, beyond reinforcement and punishment, was central to psychological length.
The second essay was the paper on magical number seven. The third, 'The human link in communication systems,' used information theory and its idea of channel capacity to analyze human perception bandwidth. The essay concluded how much of what impinges on us we can absorb as knowledge was limited, for each property of the stimulus, to a handful of items. The paper on "Psycholinguists" described how effort in both speaking or understanding a sentence was related to how much of self-reference to similar-structures-present-inside was there when the sentence was broken down into clauses and phrases. The book, in general, used the Chomskian view of seeing language rules of grammar as having a biological basis—disproving the simple behaviorist idea that language performance improved with reinforcement—and using the tools of information and computation to place hypotheses on a sound theoretical framework and to analyze data practically and efficiently. Miller specifically addressed experimental data refuting the behaviorist framework at concept level in the field of language and cognition. He noted this only qualified behaviorism at the level of cognition, and did not overthrow it in other spheres of psychology.
Legacy
The Cognitive Neuroscience Society established a George A. Miller Prize in 1995 for contributions to the field. The American Psychological Association established a George A. Miller Award in 1995 for an outstanding article on general psychology. 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. 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.
Miller was considered the 20th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century in a list republished by, among others, the American Psychological Association.
Awards
- Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1963.
- Distinguished Service award from the American Speech and Hearing Association, 1976.
- Award in Behavioral Sciences from the New York Academy of Sciences, 1982.
- Guggenheim fellow in 1986.
- William James fellow of the American Psychological Society, 1989.
- Hermann von Helmholtz award from the Cognitive Neurosciences Institute, 1989.
- Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation in 1990.
- National Medal of Science from The White House, 1991.
- Louis E. Levy medal from the Franklin Institute, 1991.
- International Prize from the Fyssen Foundation, 1992.
- William James Book award from the APA Division of General Psychology, 1993.
- John P. McGovern award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2000.
- Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology award from the APA in 2003.
- Antonio Zampolli Prize from the European Languages Research Association, 2006.
Works
- George A. Miller; Eugene Galanter; Karl H. Pribram (1960). Plans and the Structure of Behavior. Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 978-0-03-010075-8.
- — (1963). Language and Communication. McGraw Hill. ASIN B000SRSOIK.
- — (1965). Mathematics and Psychology (Perspectives in Psychology). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-60408-2.
- Frank Smith; George A. Miller, eds. (1966). The genesis of language; a psycholinguistic approach; proceedings of a conference on language development in children. The MIT Press.
- Frank Smith; George A Miller (1968). The Genesis of Language: A Psycholinguistic Approach. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-69022-5.
- George A. Miller, ed. (1973). Communication, Language and Meaning (Perspectives in Psychology). Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-12833-4.
- — (1974). Linguistic Communication: Perspectives for Research. International Reading Association. ISBN 978-0-87207-929-8.
- — (1975). The Psychology of Communication. Harper Androw-1975. ISBN 978-0-465-09707-4.
- George A. Miller; Philip N Johnson-Laird (1976). Language and Perception. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-50947-4.
- Morris Halle; Joan Bresnan; George A. Miller, eds. (1978). Linguistic theory and psychological reality. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-08095-8.
- George A. Miller; Elizabeth Lenneberg, eds. (1978). Psychology and biology of language and thought: essays in honor of Eric Lenneberg. Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-497750-1.
- Oscar Grusky; George A. Miller, eds. (1981). Sociology of Organizations (2nd ed.). Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-912930-2.
- Ned Joel Block; Jerrold J. Katz; George A. Miller, eds. (1981). Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-74878-1.
- George A. Miller; Eugene Galanter; Karl H. Pribram (1986). Plans and the Structure of Behavior. Adams Bannister Cox Pubs. ISBN 978-0-937431-00-9.
- — (1987). Spontaneous Apprentices: Children and Language (Tree of Life). Seabury Press. ISBN 978-0-8164-9330-2.
- — (1987). Language and Speech. W H Freeman & Co (sd). ISBN 978-0-7167-1297-8.
- — (1991). Psychology: The Science of Mental Life. Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 978-0-14-013489-6.
- — (1991). The Science of Words. W H Freeman & Co. ISBN 978-0-7167-5027-7.
Chapters in books
- Miller, George A.; Galanter, Eugene (1960), "Some comments on Stochastic models and psychological theories", in Arrow, Kenneth J.; Karlin, Samuel; Suppes, Patrick (eds.), Mathematical models in the social sciences, 1959: Proceedings of the first Stanford symposium, Stanford mathematical studies in the social sciences, IV, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, pp. 277–297, ISBN 978-0-8047-0021-4.
References
- Paul Vitello (August 1, 2012). "George A. Miller, a pioneer in cognitive psychology, is dead at 92". New York Times. Retrieved August 8, 2012.
- Haggbloom, Steven J.; Powell, John L. III; Warnick, Jason E.; Jones, Vinessa K.; Yarbrough, Gary L.; Russell, Tenea M.; Borecky, Chris M.; McGahhey, Reagan; et al. (2002). "The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century". Review of General Psychology. 6 (2): 139–152. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.586.1913. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.6.2.139. S2CID 145668721.
- "Profile details: George Armitage Miller". Marquis Who's Who. Retrieved August 7, 2012.
- No Authorship Indicated (1991). "Gold medal awards for life achievement: George Armitage Miller". American Psychologist. 46 (4): 326–328. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.46.4.326.
- Thomas M. Haugh II (August 6, 2012). "George A. Miller dies at 92; pioneer of cognitive psychology". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 8, 2012.
- Emily Langer (August 3, 2012). "George A. Miller; helped transform the study of psychology; at 92". Washington Post. Archived from the original on January 19, 2013. Retrieved August 8, 2012.
- Pais A. (2006). J. Robert Oppenheimer: A life. Oxford University Press. p. 89.
- Richard Hébert (July 2006). "The Miller's tale". Aps Observer. 19. American Psychological Society. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
- Lindzey, G. (1989). A History of psychology in autobiography. Stanford University Press.
- "Preeminent leaders awarded honorary degrees". Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon Today. May 13, 2003. Retrieved August 23, 2012.
- "Honorary degrees". Williams University: Office of the President. Retrieved August 23, 2012.
- Michael Hotchkiss (July 26, 2012). "George Miller, Princeton psychology professor and cognitive pioneer, dies". Retrieved August 10, 2012.
- "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved August 25, 2022.
- "G.A. ('George') Miller (1920–2012)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
- "The history of APS: A timeline". Association for Psychological Science. Archived from the original on May 15, 2012. Retrieved August 22, 2012.
- Cowan, N.; Morey, C. C.; Chen, Z. (2007). "The legend of the magical number seven" (PDF). In Sergio Della Sala (ed.). Tall tales About the Brain: Separating Fact from Fiction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-856877-3. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 18, 2013. Retrieved August 11, 2012.
- Daniel Shiffman. "Daniel Shiffman: WordNet". Archived from the original on August 19, 2012. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
- Sampson, Geoffrey (2000). "Reviews". International Journal of Lexicography. 13 (1): 54–59. doi:10.1093/ijl/13.1.54.
- "Beyond keyword searching.Oingo and Simpli.com introduce meaning-based searching". December 20, 1999. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
- "George A. Miller". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved August 8, 2012.
- N. Chomsky; George A. Miller (1957). Pattern Conception (Technical report). ASTIA. Document AD110076.
- Noam Chomsky; George A. Miller (1958). "Finite State Languages". Inform. And Control. 1 (2): 91–112. doi:10.1016/s0019-9958(58)90082-2.
- N. Chomsky; George A. Miller (1963). "Introduction to the Formal Analysis of Natural Languages". In R.R. Bush; E. Galanter; R.D. Luce (eds.). Handbook of Mathematical Psychology. Vol. 2. Wiley. pp. 269–321.
- Robert J. Banis (September 8, 2007). "BA 3320.Introduction to operations management". Archived from the original on November 25, 2012. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
- Osgood, C. E. (1952). "Language and communication". Psychological Bulletin. 49 (4): 361–363. doi:10.1037/h0052690.
- Smith, S.M. (1952). "Language and Communication". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 47 (3): 734–735. doi:10.1037/h0052503.
- Milner, P. M. (1960). "Review of Plans and the Structure of Behavior". Canadian Journal of Psychology. 14 (4): 281–282. doi:10.1037/h0083461.
- Wallace, A.F.C (1960). "Plans and the structure of behavior: Review". American Anthropologist. 62 (6): 1065–1067. doi:10.1525/aa.1960.62.6.02a00190.
- Bunge, Mario (1968). "Reviews: George A. Miller: The Psychology of Communication". The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 18 (4): 350–352. doi:10.1093/bjps/18.4.350.
- "Georage A. Miller: The Psychology of Communication: Seven Essays: Review". Journal of Business Communication. 5 (2): 54–55. 1968. doi:10.1177/002194366800500208. S2CID 220880417.
- "George A. Miller Prize in cognitive neuroscience". Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Archived from the original on March 26, 2012. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
- "George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology". American Psychological Association. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
- "George A. Miller Sr. Thesis Prize". Department of Psychology, Princeton University. 2004. Archived from the original on October 19, 2013. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
- Haggbloom, S.J.; Powell, John L. III; Warnick, Jason E.; Jones, Vinessa K.; Yarbrough, Gary L.; Russell, Tenea M.; Borecky, Chris M.; McGahhey, Reagan; et al. (2002). "The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century" (PDF). Review of General Psychology. 6 (2): 139.52. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.6.2.139. S2CID 145668721.
- "Sidebar: Eminent psychologists of the 20th century". Monitor on Psychology. 33 (7): 29. 2002.
- "LREC 2006 Conference: Winners of the 2006 Antonio Zampolli Prize". LREC. 2006. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
External links
- 2007 discussion on the cognitive revolution, with Chomsky, Bruner, Pinker and others: Part I
- 2007 discussion on the cognitive revolution, with Chomsky, Bruner, Pinker and others: Part II
- 2007 discussion on the cognitive revolution, with Chomsky, Bruner, Pinker and others: Part III
- 2007 discussion on the cognitive revolution, with Chomsky, Bruner, Pinker and others: Part IV
- Classics in the history of psychology: The seven plus/minus two paper
- Bio on Kurtzweil.net
- Old faculty page
- Communication, Language, and Meaning (edited by Miller) Archived February 22, 2020, at the Wayback Machine
- A blog with links to discussions on the seven-plus-minus-two paper
- Neurotree: Miller's academic genealogy
- George A. Miller at Library of Congress, with 26 library catalog records
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 George Armitage MillerBorn 1920 02 03 February 3 1920 Charleston West Virginia USDiedJuly 22 2012 2012 07 22 aged 92 Plainsboro New Jersey USAlma materHarvard University University of AlabamaKnown forContributions to Cognitive Psychology and Science The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two Directing WordNetAwardsNational Medal of Science 1991 Louis E Levy Medal 1991 APA Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology 2003 Scientific careerFieldsPsychology cognitive scienceInstitutionsPrinceton University Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Rockefeller University Oxford University University of Alabama American Psychological AssociationThesisOptimal Design of Jamming Signals 1946 Doctoral advisorStanley Smith StevensNotable studentsGeorge Sperling Ulric Neisser 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 BiographyMiller was born on February 3 1920 in Charleston West Virginia the son of George E Miller a steel company executive and Florence nee 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 At the University of Alabama he took courses in phonetics voice science and speech pathology earning his bachelor s degree in history and speech in 1940 and a master s in a speech in 1941 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 both to psychology and indirectly through a seminar to his future wife Katherine James They married on November 29 1939 Katherine died in January 1996 He married Margaret Ferguson Skutch Page in 2008 Miller taught the course Introduction to Psychology at Alabama for two years He enrolled in the Ph D program in psychology at Harvard University in 1943 after coming to the university in 1942 At Harvard 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 Career 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 citation needed 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 Miller had honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex 1984 Columbia University 1980 Yale University 1979 Catholic University of Louvain 1978 Carnegie Mellon University in humane letters 2003 and an honorary DSC from Williams College 2000 He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957 the National Academy of Sciences in 1962 the presidency of the Eastern Psychological Association in 1962 the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1969 the American Philosophical Society in 1971 and to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985 Miller was the keynote speaker at the first convention of the Association for Psychological Science in 1989 He was a Fulbright research fellow at Oxford University in 1964 65 and in 1991 received the National Medal of Science Death 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 Major contributionsMiller 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 Working memory 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 been 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 WordNet For many years starting from 1986 Miller directed the development of WordNet a large computer readable electronic reference usable in applications such as search engines which was created by a team that included Christiane Fellbaum among others Wordnet is a large lexical database representing human semantic memory in English Its fundamental building block is a synset which is a collection of synonyms representing a concept or idea Words can be in multiple synsets The entire class of synsets is grouped into nouns verbs adjectives and adverbs separately with links existing only within these four major groups but not between them Going beyond a thesaurus WordNet also includes inter word relationships such as part whole relationships and hierarchies of inclusion Although not intended to be a dictionary Wordnet did have many short definitions added to it as time went on Miller and colleagues had planned the tool to test psycholinguistic theories on how humans use and understand words Miller also later worked closely with entrepreneur Jeff Stibel and scientists at Simpli com Inc on a meaning based keyword search engine based on WordNet Wordnet has proved to be extremely influential on an international scale citation needed It has now been emulated by wordnets in many different languages citation needed Psychology of language Miller is one of the founders of psycholinguistics which links language and cognition in the analysis of language creation and usage His 1951 book Language and Communication is considered seminal in the field His later book The Science of Words 1991 also focused on the psychology of language Together with Noam Chomsky he published papers on the mathematical and computational aspects of language and its syntax two new areas of study Miller also studied the human understanding of words and sentences a problem also faced by artificial speech recognition technology The book Plans and the Structure of Behavior 1960 written with Eugene Galanter and Karl H Pribram explored how humans plan and act trying to extrapolate this to how a robot could be programmed to plan and act Miller is also known for coining Miller s Law In order to understand what another person is saying you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of BooksMiller authored several books many considered the first major works in their respective fields Language and Communication 1951 Miller s Language and Communication was one of the first significant texts in the study of language behavior The book was a scientific study of language emphasizing quantitative data and was based on the mathematical model of Claude Shannon s information theory It used a probabilistic model imposed on a learning by association scheme borrowed from behaviorism with Miller not yet attached to a pure cognitive perspective The first part of the book reviewed information theory the physiology and acoustics of phonetics speech recognition and comprehension and statistical techniques to analyze language The focus was more on speech generation than recognition The second part had the psychology idiosyncratic differences across people in language use developmental linguistics the structure of word associations in people use of symbolism in language and social aspects of language use Reviewing the book Charles E Osgood classified the book as a graduate level text based more on objective facts than on theoretical constructs He thought the book was verbose on some topics and too brief on others not directly related to the author s expertise area He was also critical of Miller s use of simple Skinnerian single stage stimulus response learning to explain human language acquisition and use This approach per Osgood made it impossible to analyze the concept of meaning and the idea of language consisting of representational signs He did find the book objective in its emphasis on facts over theory and depicting clearly application of information theory to psychology Plans and the Structure of Behavior 1960 In Plans and the Structure of Behavior Miller and his co authors tried to explain through an artificial intelligence computational perspective how animals plan and act This was a radical break from behaviorism which explained behavior as a set or sequence of stimulus response actions The authors introduced a planning element controlling such actions They saw all plans as being executed based on input using a stored or inherited information of the environment called the image and using a strategy called test operate test exit TOTE The image was essentially a stored memory of all past context akin to Tolman s cognitive map The TOTE strategy in its initial test phase compared the input against the image if there was incongruity the operate function attempted to reduce it This cycle would be repeated till the incongruity vanished and then the exit function would be invoked passing control to another TOTE unit in a hierarchically arranged scheme Peter Milner in a review in the Canadian Journal of Psychology noted the book was short on concrete details on implementing the TOTE strategy He also critically viewed the book as not being able to tie its model to details from neurophysiology at a molecular level Per him the book covered only the brain at the gross level of showing that some of its regions could possibly implement some TOTE strategies without giving a reader an indication as to how the region could implement the strategy The Psychology of Communication 1967 Miller s 1967 work The Psychology of Communication was a collection of seven previously published articles The first Information and Memory dealt with chunking presenting the idea of separating physical length the number of items presented to be learned and psychological length the number of ideas the recipient manages to categorize and summarize the items with Capacity of short term memory was measured in units of psychological length arguing against a pure behaviorist interpretation since meaning of items beyond reinforcement and punishment was central to psychological length The second essay was the paper on magical number seven The third The human link in communication systems used information theory and its idea of channel capacity to analyze human perception bandwidth The essay concluded how much of what impinges on us we can absorb as knowledge was limited for each property of the stimulus to a handful of items The paper on Psycholinguists described how effort in both speaking or understanding a sentence was related to how much of self reference to similar structures present inside was there when the sentence was broken down into clauses and phrases The book in general used the Chomskian view of seeing language rules of grammar as having a biological basis disproving the simple behaviorist idea that language performance improved with reinforcement and using the tools of information and computation to place hypotheses on a sound theoretical framework and to analyze data practically and efficiently Miller specifically addressed experimental data refuting the behaviorist framework at concept level in the field of language and cognition He noted this only qualified behaviorism at the level of cognition and did not overthrow it in other spheres of psychology LegacyThe Cognitive Neuroscience Society established a George A Miller Prize in 1995 for contributions to the field The American Psychological Association established a George A Miller Award in 1995 for an outstanding article on general psychology 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 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 Miller was considered the 20th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century in a list republished by among others the American Psychological Association AwardsDistinguished Scientific Contribution award from the American Psychological Association APA in 1963 Distinguished Service award from the American Speech and Hearing Association 1976 Award in Behavioral Sciences from the New York Academy of Sciences 1982 Guggenheim fellow in 1986 William James fellow of the American Psychological Society 1989 Hermann von Helmholtz award from the Cognitive Neurosciences Institute 1989 Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation in 1990 National Medal of Science from The White House 1991 Louis E Levy medal from the Franklin Institute 1991 International Prize from the Fyssen Foundation 1992 William James Book award from the APA Division of General Psychology 1993 John P McGovern award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2000 Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology award from the APA in 2003 Antonio Zampolli Prize from the European Languages Research Association 2006 WorksGeorge A Miller Eugene Galanter Karl H Pribram 1960 Plans and the Structure of Behavior Henry Holt amp Co ISBN 978 0 03 010075 8 1963 Language and Communication McGraw Hill ASIN B000SRSOIK 1965 Mathematics and Psychology Perspectives in Psychology John Wiley amp Sons ISBN 978 0 471 60408 2 Frank Smith George A Miller eds 1966 The genesis of language a psycholinguistic approach proceedings of a conference on language development in children The MIT Press Frank Smith George A Miller 1968 The Genesis of Language A Psycholinguistic Approach The MIT Press ISBN 978 0 262 69022 5 George A Miller ed 1973 Communication Language and Meaning Perspectives in Psychology Basic Books ISBN 978 0 465 12833 4 1974 Linguistic Communication Perspectives for Research International Reading Association ISBN 978 0 87207 929 8 1975 The Psychology of Communication Harper Androw 1975 ISBN 978 0 465 09707 4 George A Miller Philip N Johnson Laird 1976 Language and Perception Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 50947 4 Morris Halle Joan Bresnan George A Miller eds 1978 Linguistic theory and psychological reality The MIT Press ISBN 978 0 262 08095 8 George A Miller Elizabeth Lenneberg eds 1978 Psychology and biology of language and thought essays in honor of Eric Lenneberg Academic Press ISBN 978 0 12 497750 1 Oscar Grusky George A Miller eds 1981 Sociology of Organizations 2nd ed Free Press ISBN 978 0 02 912930 2 Ned Joel Block Jerrold J Katz George A Miller eds 1981 Readings in Philosophy of Psychology Volume II Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 74878 1 George A Miller Eugene Galanter Karl H Pribram 1986 Plans and the Structure of Behavior Adams Bannister Cox Pubs ISBN 978 0 937431 00 9 1987 Spontaneous Apprentices Children and Language Tree of Life Seabury Press ISBN 978 0 8164 9330 2 1987 Language and Speech W H Freeman amp Co sd ISBN 978 0 7167 1297 8 1991 Psychology The Science of Mental Life Penguin Books Ltd ISBN 978 0 14 013489 6 1991 The Science of Words W H Freeman amp Co ISBN 978 0 7167 5027 7 Chapters in books Miller George A Galanter Eugene 1960 Some comments on Stochastic models and psychological theories in Arrow Kenneth J Karlin Samuel Suppes Patrick eds Mathematical models in the social sciences 1959 Proceedings of the first Stanford symposium Stanford mathematical studies in the social sciences IV Stanford California Stanford University Press pp 277 297 ISBN 978 0 8047 0021 4 ReferencesPaul Vitello August 1 2012 George A Miller a pioneer in cognitive psychology is dead at 92 New York Times Retrieved August 8 2012 Haggbloom Steven J Powell John L III Warnick Jason E Jones Vinessa K Yarbrough Gary L Russell Tenea M Borecky Chris M McGahhey Reagan et al 2002 The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century Review of General Psychology 6 2 139 152 CiteSeerX 10 1 1 586 1913 doi 10 1037 1089 2680 6 2 139 S2CID 145668721 Profile details George Armitage Miller Marquis Who s Who Retrieved August 7 2012 No Authorship Indicated 1991 Gold medal awards for life achievement George Armitage Miller American Psychologist 46 4 326 328 doi 10 1037 0003 066X 46 4 326 Thomas M Haugh II August 6 2012 George A Miller dies at 92 pioneer of cognitive psychology Los Angeles Times Retrieved August 8 2012 Emily Langer August 3 2012 George A Miller helped transform the study of psychology at 92 Washington Post Archived from the original on January 19 2013 Retrieved August 8 2012 Pais A 2006 J Robert Oppenheimer A life Oxford University Press p 89 Richard Hebert July 2006 The Miller s tale Aps Observer 19 American Psychological Society Retrieved August 10 2012 Lindzey G 1989 A History of psychology in autobiography Stanford University Press Preeminent leaders awarded honorary degrees Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon Today May 13 2003 Retrieved August 23 2012 Honorary degrees Williams University Office of the President Retrieved August 23 2012 Michael Hotchkiss July 26 2012 George Miller Princeton psychology professor and cognitive pioneer dies Retrieved August 10 2012 APS Member History search amphilsoc org Retrieved August 25 2022 G A George Miller 1920 2012 Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Retrieved July 17 2015 The history of APS A timeline Association for Psychological Science Archived from the original on May 15 2012 Retrieved August 22 2012 Cowan N Morey C C Chen Z 2007 The legend of the magical number seven PDF In Sergio Della Sala ed Tall tales About the Brain Separating Fact from Fiction Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 856877 3 Archived from the original PDF on April 18 2013 Retrieved August 11 2012 Daniel Shiffman Daniel Shiffman WordNet Archived from the original on August 19 2012 Retrieved August 10 2012 Sampson Geoffrey 2000 Reviews International Journal of Lexicography 13 1 54 59 doi 10 1093 ijl 13 1 54 Beyond keyword searching Oingo and Simpli com introduce meaning based searching December 20 1999 Retrieved August 10 2012 George A Miller Encyclopaedia Britannica Retrieved August 8 2012 N Chomsky George A Miller 1957 Pattern Conception Technical report ASTIA Document AD110076 Noam Chomsky George A Miller 1958 Finite State Languages Inform And Control 1 2 91 112 doi 10 1016 s0019 9958 58 90082 2 N Chomsky George A Miller 1963 Introduction to the Formal Analysis of Natural Languages In R R Bush E Galanter R D Luce eds Handbook of Mathematical Psychology Vol 2 Wiley pp 269 321 Robert J Banis September 8 2007 BA 3320 Introduction to operations management Archived from the original on November 25 2012 Retrieved August 10 2012 Osgood C E 1952 Language and communication Psychological Bulletin 49 4 361 363 doi 10 1037 h0052690 Smith S M 1952 Language and Communication Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 47 3 734 735 doi 10 1037 h0052503 Milner P M 1960 Review of Plans and the Structure of Behavior Canadian Journal of Psychology 14 4 281 282 doi 10 1037 h0083461 Wallace A F C 1960 Plans and the structure of behavior Review American Anthropologist 62 6 1065 1067 doi 10 1525 aa 1960 62 6 02a00190 Bunge Mario 1968 Reviews George A Miller The Psychology of Communication The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 4 350 352 doi 10 1093 bjps 18 4 350 Georage A Miller The Psychology of Communication Seven Essays Review Journal of Business Communication 5 2 54 55 1968 doi 10 1177 002194366800500208 S2CID 220880417 George A Miller Prize in cognitive neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience Society Archived from the original on March 26 2012 Retrieved August 10 2012 George A Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology American Psychological Association Retrieved August 10 2012 George A Miller Sr Thesis Prize Department of Psychology Princeton University 2004 Archived from the original on October 19 2013 Retrieved August 10 2012 Haggbloom S J Powell John L III Warnick Jason E Jones Vinessa K Yarbrough Gary L Russell Tenea M Borecky Chris M McGahhey Reagan et al 2002 The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century PDF Review of General Psychology 6 2 139 52 doi 10 1037 1089 2680 6 2 139 S2CID 145668721 Sidebar Eminent psychologists of the 20th century Monitor on Psychology 33 7 29 2002 LREC 2006 Conference Winners of the 2006 Antonio Zampolli Prize LREC 2006 Retrieved August 10 2012 External links2007 discussion on the cognitive revolution with Chomsky Bruner Pinker and others Part I 2007 discussion on the cognitive revolution with Chomsky Bruner Pinker and others Part II 2007 discussion on the cognitive revolution with Chomsky Bruner Pinker and others Part III 2007 discussion on the cognitive revolution with Chomsky Bruner Pinker and others Part IV Classics in the history of psychology The seven plus minus two paper Bio on Kurtzweil net Old faculty page Communication Language and Meaning edited by Miller Archived February 22 2020 at the Wayback Machine A blog with links to discussions on the seven plus minus two paper Neurotree Miller s academic genealogy George A Miller at Library of Congress with 26 library catalog records