George A. Miller

George Armitage Miller (3rd February 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia) is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at Princeton University.

In 1940 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Alabama and in 1946 he received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University.

He has served as Professor of Psychology at Rockerfeller 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 at 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 cognitivist 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.He is also working on READER - a lexical aid that uses wordnet to help students read computer text.

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Preceded by: Abraham Maslow

George A. Miller elected APA President 1969

Succeeded by: George W. Albee

Publications

Books

• Miller, G.A., Galanter, E. and Pribram, K.H. (1960) Plans and the Structure of Behaviour, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Papers

• Miller, G.A. (1956) The magical number seven, plus or minus two; some limits on our capacity for processing information, Psychological Review 63; 81-97.

• Miller,G.A. and Friedman, E.A. (1957)The reconstruction of mutilated English texts. Information and Control, 1(1):38-55,

• Chomsky, N. and Miller,G.A. (1958) Finite state languages. Information and Control, 1(2):91-112.

• Miller,G.A. Newman,E.B. and Friedman, E.A. (1958). Length-frequency statistics for written English. Information and Control, 1(4):370-389.

• Miller,G.A. and Isard, S. (1964). Free recall of self-embedded English sentences. Information and Control, 7(3):292-303.

External links

• George A. Miller's web page at Princeton University
• Miller's "Psychology as a Means of Promoting Human Welfare," 1969 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association
• Miller, G. (1956): "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information", Psychological Review, vol. 63 pp. 81-97 [1]