George A. Miller

Professor of psychology at Princeton University

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George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia) is a famous professor of psychology at Princeton University. 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 and served as the President of the American Psychological Association. His most famous work was The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information, which was published in 1956 in The Psychological Review.

In 1960, Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Jerome Bruner (a cognitive developmentalist). In the same year he published 'Plans and the Structure of Behaviour' (with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram), which outlined their conception of Cognitive Psychology.

In the linguistics community, Miller is well-known for overseeing the development of WordNet, a semantic network for the English language. Development began in 1985 and the project has received about $3 million of funding, mainly from government agencies interested in machine translation.

In 1991, Miller received National Medal of Science.

In 1956, Miller 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.

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.

 

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Publications by George A. Miller (bibliography)

» 1997 «

Miller, George A. (1997): Information Retrieval with a Dictionary. In: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 1997. p. 3.

» 1956 «

Miller, George A. (1956): The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. In Psychological Review, 63 pp. 81-97

 

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