George Armitage Miller

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Lore & Background

Miller was born on February 3, 1920, in Charleston, West Virginia, the son of George E. Miller 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 earned a BA with a major in history and speech in 1940 and an MA in speech in 1941 from the University of Alabama, then an MA in psychology in 1944 and a PhD in psychology in 1946 from Harvard University. At Harvard, he worked in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory under Stanley Smith Stevens, researching military voice communications for the Army Signal Corps during World War II. 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 and was appointed an assistant professor of psychology in 1948. He took a sabbatical in 1950 and spent a year as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where he befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 1951, Miller joined MIT as an associate professor of psychology, leading the psychology group at the MIT Lincoln Lab. His research on minimal voice features for speech intelligibility led to his 1955 presentation at the Eastern Psychological Association, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two," later published as a legendary paper. Miller moved back to Harvard as a tenured associate professor in 1955 and became a full professor in 1958. There he met a young Noam Chomsky, and they spent a summer together at Stanford, where their two families shared a house. In 1960, with Jerome S. Bruner, Miller co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, a break from behaviorism. He later taught at Rockefeller University from 1968 to 1979 and then moved to Princeton University as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology. At Princeton he helped found the Cognitive Science Laboratory in 1986 and directed the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Science. Miller died in 2012 at his home in Plainsboro, New Jersey, of complications of pneumonia and dementia.

Reader's Guide

George Armitage Miller is considered one of the great twentieth-century psychologists for moving psychology into the realm of mental processes and for aligning that move with information theory, computation theory, and linguistics. He began his career when behaviorism dominated psychology, 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. His 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture, and it strongly influenced the budding field of cognitive psychology. Miller invented the term "chunk" to characterize the way individuals could cope with the limitation on memory, effectively reducing the number of elements by grouping them. 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, created by a team that included Christiane Fellbaum. WordNet is a large lexical database representing human semantic memory in English, with synsets as its fundamental building block. A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002 ranked Miller as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era. He won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.

Did You Know?

• Miller's doctoral thesis, 'The Optimal Design of Jamming Signals,' was classified top secret by the US Army.
• He befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer while a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and played squash with him.
• Miller co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard in 1960 with Jerome S. Bruner, a break from the then-dominant school of behaviorism.
• He invented the term 'chunk' to describe how people group items to cope with the seven-item limit of short-term memory.
• A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002 ranked Miller as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era.