George A. Miller facts for kids
George Armitrage Miller (born February 3, 1920 – died July 22, 2012) was a very important American psychologist. He is known as one of the people who started cognitive psychology in the 20th century. This field of study looks at how people think, learn, remember, and use language.
Miller discovered something interesting about how our memory works. He found that most people can only remember about five to nine things at once, like words or numbers, for a short time. He wrote a famous paper called The magical number seven, plus or minus two, which explained this limit in our short-term memory. Miller helped change psychology by showing that we could study and test how the human mind works in a scientific way. In 1991, he received the National Medal of Science, a very high honor.
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Early Life and Education
George Miller was born in Charleston, West Virginia. He went to the University of Alabama and earned his first degree in English and speech in 1940. Later, in 1946, he received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University. Throughout his career, he taught as a professor at famous universities like Princeton University, Harvard, and Rockefeller University. He passed away in Plainsboro Township, New Jersey when he was 92 years old.
Understanding Memory with Chunking
One important idea Miller introduced is called chunking. This is a clever way to help people remember more information. It works for both short-term memory and long-term memory.
When Miller asked people to remember lists of things, he noticed that most could only recall about seven items, no matter what the items were. He explained that our short-term memory can usually hold about 5 to 9 "chunks" of information. A "chunk" can be a single number, a word, a face, or any group of things that have meaning together.
Chunking means grouping several small pieces of information into one larger, more meaningful unit. This makes it much easier to remember. For example, if you need to remember a long number like 245614270, you can "chunk" it into smaller groups, like 245 614 270. This makes it easier for your brain to hold onto the information.
The Magical Number Seven
Miller's most famous work is a paper titled "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information." It was first published in The Psychology Review. This paper is still one of the most well-known and quoted works in psychology.
In this paper, Miller explained the average number of items, numbers, or objects that a person's memory can hold at one time. He wrote that this number "assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable." Through many memory tests, he became convinced that seven was the key number. The paper also explains that our memory span is complex and can hold a lot of information when organized well.
Wordnet Project
In the mid-1980s, Miller started working on a big project called Wordnet. This is a huge online database of English words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. These words are grouped together into sets of "cognitive synonyms." This means words that have similar meanings are put together to represent a specific idea or concept.
Wordnet is a bit like a thesaurus because it helps you find words with similar meanings. Miller wanted to use Wordnet as a tool to test his theories about how people use and understand words. It helped researchers study how our minds connect different words and ideas.
Institutions
Awards and Recognition
George Miller received many important awards for his work in psychology:
- Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the American Psychological Association, 1963
- Distinguished Service award from the American Speech and Hearing Association, 1976
- Award in Behavioral Sciences from the New York Academy of Sciences, 1982
- Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation, 1990
- National Medal of Science from the White House, 1991
- Louis E. Levy Medal from the Franklin Institute, 1991
- International Prize from the Fyssen Foundation, 1992
- John P. McGovern award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2000
- Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology award from the American Psychological Association, 2003
- Antonio Zampolli Prize from the European Languages Research Association, 2006
