George Armitage Miller

George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist and one of the founders of the cognitive psychology field. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics and cognitive science in general.

Early life and education

Miller was born in Charleston, West Virginia. He completed his bachelor's degree in history and speech from the University of Alabama in 1940. He then received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University in 1946 under the supervision of Gordon Allport.

Career

Miller started his career as a social psychologist. He was a faculty member at Harvard University from 1946 to 1951, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1951 to 1955. He later joined the faculty at Rockefeller University and then at Princeton University.

Miller is best known for his work in cognitive psychology, particularly the theory of chunking and the concept of the "magical number seven". He proposed that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is about seven.

Contributions to psychology

Miller's most famous contribution to psychology is his 1956 article "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information". The article was published in the Psychological Review and has been cited over 20,000 times.

Miller also co-founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies in 1960 with Jerome Bruner, which was instrumental in the cognitive revolution.

Personal life and death

Miller was married to Margaret Ferguson and they had three children. He died on July 22, 2012, in Plainsboro, New Jersey.

See also

• List of cognitive psychologists
• History of psychology

External links

• George A. Miller's Princeton lab

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• George Armitage Miller speaking at the first APS convention in 1989.jpg

  George Armitage Miller speaking at the first APS convention in 1989