George Armitage Miller

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

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. After his stepfather was transferred to Birmingham, Alabama, Miller transferred to the University of Alabama. He 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. As a graduate student at Harvard, he worked in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory under the supervision of 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, continuing his research on speech and hearing. He 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, to pursue his interest in mathematics. There he 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. 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. 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 center attracted such notable visitors as Jean Piaget, Alexander Luria and Chomsky. Miller then became the chair of the psychology department. From 1968 to 1979, he was Professor at Rockefeller University and continued as adjunct professor there from 1979 to 1982. He then 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.

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 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. In 1956, Miller published "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. 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. 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. It has now been emulated by wordnets in many different languages. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Miller as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era.

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 at the Institute for Advanced Study and played squash with him.
• Miller co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard in 1960 along with Jerome S. Bruner.
• He invented the term 'chunk' to describe how people group items to cope with the seven-item limit of short-term memory.
• Miller jokingly suggested he was being persecuted by an integer because his famous 'Magical Number Seven' paper was often misquoted.