George A. Miller

George Armitage Miller (born February 3, 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia) is the author of one of the most highly cited papers in psychology, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" published in 1956 in Psychological Review. This paper suggests that seven (plus or minus two) is the magic number that characterizes people's memory performance on random lists of letters, words, numbers, or almost any kind of meaningful familiar item. In 1960... more

George Armitage Miller (born February 3, 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia) is the author of one of the most highly cited papers in psychology, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" published in 1956 in Psychological Review. This paper suggests that seven (plus or minus two) is the magic number that characterizes people's memory performance on random lists of letters, words, numbers, or almost any kind of meaningful familiar item. In 1960, Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Jerome Bruner, a cognitive developmentalist. In the same year, he published a key book in the development of nonbehaviorist psychology, 'Plans and the Structure of Behaviour' (with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram), which outlined their conception of Cognitive Psychology. He is known in the linguistics community, for overseeing the development of WordNet, a semantic network for the English language. He is also known for coining Miller's Law: In order to understand what another... less