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Sep 26, 2012 · Remembering George A. Miller. George A. Miller delivers the Keynote Address, “The Place of Language in Scientific Psychology,” at the first APS Annual Convention in 1989. The human mind works a lot like a computer: It collects, saves, modifies, and retrieves information. George A. Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, was a ...
One of Miller’s most famous discoveries was that human short-term memory is generally limited to holding seven pieces of information, plus or minus two. Miller received a B.A. in history and speech (1940) and an M.A. in speech (1941) from the University of Alabama and an M.A. (1944) and a Ph.D. (1946) in psychology from Harvard University.
Human information processing is thus constricted by a bottleneck of 7 plus or minus 2 chunks. With this remarkable insight, George Miller helped to launch the cognitive revolution (pdf), ushering in a new era of theory and research in American psychology. At this time Miller was a young professor in Harvard’s Psychology Department.
The 1956 paper ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two’ is Miller’s most famous, and remains one of the most frequently cited papers in the history of psychology. In this classic of cognitive psychology, Miller proposed that short-term memory is subject to certain limits including span and the quantity of information that can be stored at a given time.
Miller recognised the revolutionary potential of psychology and went on to say, …if we were ever to achieve substantial progress toward our stated aim – toward the understanding, prediction and control of mental and -2- behavioural phenomena – the implications for every aspect of society would make brave men tremble (1969:1065).
- Julie Hulme
American psychologist and innovator in the study of language and cognition. Helped establish psycholinguistics as an independent field of research in psychology. Married to Katherine James. George Miller was born on February 3, 1920, in Charleston, Virginia. Miller, was raised a Christian Scientist and lived with his parents until they divorced ...
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The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information [1] George A. Miller (1956) Harvard University First published in Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data ...
