George Armitage Miller (born
February 3, 1920 in
Charleston,
West Virginia), is the author of one of the most highly cited papers in psychology,
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two [1] published in 1956 in
Psychological Review.
[2][3][4] This paper suggested that seven (plus or minus two) was the magic number that characterized people's memory performance on random lists of letters, words, numbers, or almost any kind of meaningful familiar item.
Miller founded in 1960, the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Jerome Bruner, a cognitive developmentalist. In the same year he published a key book in the development of nonbehaviorist psychology, 'Plans and the Structure of Behaviour' (with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram), which outlined their conception of Cognitive Psychology.
He is known in the linguistics community, for overseeing the development of WordNet, a semantic network for the English language. He 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.
He is presently professor of psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. He formerly served as Professor of Psychology at Rockefeller University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University, where he was Chairman of the Department of Psychology. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow at Oxford University. He is also a former President of the American Psychological Association, and in 1991, received the National Medal of Science.
