George Armitage Miller

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George Armitage Miller bigraphy, stories - American psychologist, cognitive scientist

George Armitage Miller : biography

February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012

George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) 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," which experimentally discovered 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, by linking the new field of cognitive psychology to the broader area of cognitive science, including computation theory and linguistics. 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.

Life and education

Miller was born on February 3, 1920, at Charleston, West Virginia, the son of an executive at a steel company, George E. Miller, and Florence (Armitage) Miller. Soon after, his parents divorced. He grew up with only his mother during the Great Depression, attended public school, and graduated from Charleston High School in 1937. He relocated with his mother and stepfather to Washington D.C., and was at 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.

He received his bachelor’s degree in history and speech in 1940, and a master’s in speech in 1941 from the University of Alabama. He had taken courses in phonetics, voice science, and speech pathology . Membership in the Drama club 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. He received his doctorate in 1946 from Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, under the supervision of Stanley Smith Stevens, researching military voice communications for the Army Signal Corps during World War II. His doctorate thesis, "The Optimal Design of Jamming Signals," was classified top secret by the US Army. He was on the faculty at Harvard, MIT and Rockefeller University before settling at Princeton in 1979.

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 passing, 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.

Career

After receiving his doctorate, Miller stayed as a research fellow at Harvard, to continue his research on speech and hearing. He was appointed assistant professor of psychology in 1948. The course he developed on language and communication would eventually lead 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 MIT Lincoln Lab. He worked on voice communication and human engineering, whereupon he identified the minimal voice features of speech required for it to be intelligible. Based on this work, in 1955, he was invited to a 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.