George Armitage Miller facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
George Armitage Miller
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| Born | February 3, 1920 |
| Died | July 22, 2012 (aged 92) |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology, cognitive science |
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| Thesis | Optimal Design of Jamming Signals (1946) |
| Doctoral advisor | Stanley Smith Stevens |
| Notable students | George Sperling, Ulric Neisser |
George Armitage Miller (born February 3, 1920 – died July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist. He is known as one of the main people who started cognitive psychology and cognitive science. These fields study how our minds work, like thinking, remembering, and solving problems. Miller also helped create psycholinguistics, which looks at how language and the mind are connected.
He wrote many important books and led the creation of WordNet. This is an online dictionary that links words together, and computers can use it. Miller also wrote a famous paper called "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." In this paper, he showed that people can usually only remember about seven things at a time in their short-term memory. This idea is still very important in psychology today. Miller received many awards, including the National Medal of Science.
When Miller started his work, most psychologists believed in something called behaviorism. This idea focused only on what people did (their behavior) and ignored what went on inside their minds. Miller didn't agree with this. He created new ways to study mental processes, especially how we use and understand speech and language. He worked at famous universities like Harvard University, MIT, and Princeton University. He became a key person in starting cognitive science around 1978. Miller worked with other famous scientists, like Noam Chomsky. Because he helped psychology start studying the mind and linked it with computer science and language studies, Miller is seen as one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century.
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Biography
George Armitage Miller was born on February 3, 1920, in Charleston, West Virginia. His father was George E. Miller, who worked for a steel company. His mother was Florence Armitage Miller. His parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up with his mother during the Great Depression. He went to public school and finished Charleston High School in 1937.
Later, he moved with his mother and stepfather to Washington D.C. He attended George Washington University for a year. His family followed Christian Science. When his stepfather moved to Birmingham, Alabama, Miller transferred to the University of Alabama.
At the University of Alabama, he studied how sounds are made (phonetics), voice science, and speech problems. He earned his bachelor's degree in history and speech in 1940. He then got his master's degree in speech in 1941. He was interested in speech because he was part of the Drama club. A professor named Donald Ramsdell also introduced him to psychology. Through a seminar, he met his future wife, Katherine James. They got married on November 29, 1939. Katherine passed away in January 1996. Miller later married Margaret Ferguson Skutch Page in 2008.
Miller taught "Introduction to Psychology" at the University of Alabama for two years. In 1942, he moved to Harvard University and started his Ph.D. program in psychology in 1943. At Harvard, he worked in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory. He researched military voice communications for the Army Signal Corps during World War II. He earned his doctorate degree in 1946. His Ph.D. paper, "The Optimal Design of Jamming Signals," was kept secret by the US Army.
What did George Miller do in his career?
After getting his doctorate, Miller stayed at Harvard as a researcher. He continued to study speech and hearing. In 1948, he became an assistant professor of psychology. He created a course on language and communication, which led to his first major book, Language and Communication (1951).
In 1950, he took a break and spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He wanted to study mathematics more. There, he became friends with J. Robert Oppenheimer, a famous scientist.
In 1951, Miller joined MIT as a psychology professor. He led the psychology team at the MIT Lincoln Lab. He worked on voice communication and how humans interact with machines. One important result of this work was finding the smallest voice features needed for speech to be understood. Based on this, he gave a talk in 1955 called "The magical number seven, plus or minus two." This talk later became a very famous paper in cognitive psychology.
Miller returned to Harvard in 1955 as a professor. He became a full professor in 1958. He expanded his research to how language affects human thinking. At Harvard, he met Noam Chomsky, another important person in cognitive science. They even shared a house one summer.
In 1960, Miller and Jerome Bruner started the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. This center was a big step away from behaviorism, which didn't believe the mind could be studied scientifically. The center welcomed famous thinkers like Jean Piaget and Chomsky. Miller then became the head of the psychology department.
From 1968 to 1979, he was a professor at Rockefeller University. Then, he moved to Princeton University as a distinguished professor of psychology. At Princeton, he helped start the Cognitive Science Laboratory in 1986. He also directed the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Science. Eventually, he became a professor emeritus (retired but still connected to the university) and a senior research psychologist at Princeton.
Miller received many honorary doctorates from universities around the world, including Columbia University and Yale University. He was elected to important groups like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was also president of the American Psychological Association in 1969. In 1991, he received the National Medal of Science, one of the highest honors for scientists in the U.S.
When did George Miller die?
In his later years, Miller enjoyed playing golf. He passed away on July 22, 2012, at his home in Plainsboro, New Jersey. He died from problems related to pneumonia and dementia. He was survived by his wife Margaret, his two children, and his grandchildren.
Major contributions
Miller started his career when behaviorism was the main idea in psychology. Behaviorists believed that only things you could see (like actions) should be studied, not thoughts or feelings. Miller disagreed. He and others, like Jerome Bruner and Noam Chomsky, started the field of Cognitive Psychology. This new field said that studying mental processes was key to understanding how people behave. Over time, this cognitive approach became the main way psychologists did research.
What is working memory?
Psychologists have long known that we have short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory seemed to have a limit, but no one knew what that limit was. In 1956, Miller gave a number to this limit in his paper "The magical number seven, plus or minus two."
He found this number by doing experiments. For example, he would ask people to remember a list of numbers, or to quickly count things. In these tests, Miller found that people could usually remember about seven items. He later felt that his work was sometimes misunderstood. He even joked that he was being "persecuted by an integer" (meaning the number seven).
Miller also came up with the idea of "chunking." This is how people deal with the memory limit. They group items together to remember more. For example, instead of remembering seven separate letters, you might remember them as one familiar word. These ideas greatly influenced the new field of cognitive psychology.
What is WordNet?
Starting in 1986, Miller led the creation of WordNet. This is a huge online dictionary that computers can read. It's used in things like search engines. WordNet is like a giant map of how words are connected in English.
Its basic part is a "synset," which is a group of words that mean the same thing (synonyms). A word can be in many different synsets. All the synsets are sorted into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Links only exist within these four main groups. WordNet also shows how words are related in other ways, like parts of a whole, or categories. Even though it wasn't meant to be a regular dictionary, it ended up having many short definitions.
Miller and his team created WordNet to test ideas about how humans use and understand words. WordNet has become very important around the world. Many other "wordnets" have been created for different languages, based on Miller's original idea.
The psychology of language
Miller is one of the founders of psycholinguistics. This field connects language and how we think to understand how we create and use language. His 1951 book, Language and Communication, is considered a very important book in this field. His later book, The Science of Words (1991), also focused on the psychology of language.
Working with Noam Chomsky, Miller published papers on the mathematical and computer parts of language and its syntax (how sentences are built). These were new areas of study. Miller also studied how humans understand words and sentences. This is a problem that also affects computer programs that try to understand speech.
In the book Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960), Miller and his co-authors explored how humans plan and act. They tried to see how a robot could be programmed to do the same. Miller is also known for something called "Miller's Law." It says: "To understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of."
Books
George Miller wrote several books. Many of them are considered the first major works in their fields.
- Language and Communication, 1951: This book was one of the first important studies of language. It used ideas from Claude Shannon's information theory, which is about how information is sent and received.
- Plans and the Structure of Behavior, 1960: In this book, Miller and his co-authors tried to explain how animals (and humans) plan and act, using ideas from artificial intelligence. They suggested that instead of just reacting to things, we have a "plan" in our minds. They introduced the idea of "test-operate-test-exit" (TOTE), which is a way our minds might work to solve problems.
- The Psychology of Communication, 1967: This book was a collection of seven earlier articles. It talked about "chunking" (grouping information in memory) and the "magical number seven." It also used information theory to explain how much information humans can take in. The book showed how language rules might be built into our biology, going against the simple behaviorist idea that language is just learned through rewards.
Legacy
Miller's work had a lasting impact. The Cognitive Neuroscience Society created a George A. Miller Prize in 1995 for important work in their field. The American Psychological Association also created a George A. Miller Award in 1995 for excellent articles in psychology. Princeton University gives out a George A. Miller prize each year for the best student paper in cognitive science.
His famous paper about the "magical number seven" is still often mentioned. People use it to explain why phone numbers are often seven digits long. In psychology, it's used to show how cognitive psychology broke away from the older behaviorist ideas. Miller was ranked as the 20th most important psychologist of the 20th century.
Awards
- Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1963.
- Distinguished Service award from the American Speech and Hearing Association, 1976.
- Award in Behavioral Sciences from the New York Academy of Sciences, 1982.
- Guggenheim fellow in 1986.
- William James fellow of the American Psychological Society, 1989.
- Hermann von Helmholtz award from the Cognitive Neurosciences Institute, 1989.
- Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation in 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.
- William James Book award from the APA Division of General Psychology, 1993.
- John P. McGovern award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2000.
- Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology award from the APA in 2003.
- Antonio Zampolli Prize from the European Languages Research Association, 2006.
List of Miller's books
- Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960)
- Language and Communication (1963)
- Mathematics and Psychology (1965)
- The Genesis of Language: A Psycholinguistic Approach (1966, with Frank Smith)
- Communication, Language and Meaning (1973, editor)
- Linguistic Communication: Perspectives for Research (1974)
- The Psychology of Communication (1975)
- Language and Perception (1976, with Philip N Johnson-Laird)
- Linguistic theory and psychological reality (1978, editor)
- Psychology and biology of language and thought : essays in honor of Eric Lenneberg (1978, editor)
- Sociology of Organizations (1981, with Oscar Grusky)
- Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II (1981, editor)
- Spontaneous Apprentices: Children and Language (1987)
- Language and Speech (1987)
- Psychology: The Science of Mental Life (1991)
- The Science of Words (1991)
See also
In Spanish: George Armitage Miller para niños
