George Armitage Miller

George Armitage Miller

George Armitage Miller was born February 3rd, 1920, in Charleston West-Virginia. George grew up in Great Depression. His parents were divorced in 1927, and he and his mother resided in Charleston with her parents. He was raised a Christian Scientist so he rejected the text based on its anatomical drawings.

He graduated high school in 1937, and then moved to Washington, D.C. He was at George Washington University when he became interested in Psychology after talking to a freshman enrolled there. His stepfather transferred in 1938 to Alabama, so Miller transferred to University of Alabama.

1939, he encountered Donald Ramsdell, the Professor of Psychology at the University of Alabama. Ramsdell was laid back and enjoyed lecturing from his home. Miller was not interested in psychology seminars; rather he was interested in Kurt Goldstein's "The Organism."

His work at the University of Alabama was made worthwhile by his pursuit of Katherine James. Ramsdell took Miller under his wing by offering Miller a job after he had completed his Masters level coursework. This was Miller's first position as a psychology instructor. He was then married to Katherine James.

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

In June of 1942, Miller went to Harvard. At Harvard, during and after World War II, he studied speech production and perception. In 1948 C. E. Shannon's mathematical theory of communication inspired a series of experiments measuring how far a listener's expectations influence his perceptions. Miller summarized the work in 1951 in "Language and Communication," a text that helped to establish psycholinguistics as an independent field of research in psychology. He subsequently tried to extend Shannon's measure of explanation to explain short-term memory, work that resulted in a widely quoted (and often misquoted) paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two."

"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two"

Working memory is generally considered to have limited capacity. The earliest quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term memory was the "magical number seven" introduced by Miller (1956). He noticed that the memory span of young adults was around seven elements, called chunks, regardless whether the elements were digits, letters, words, or other units. Later research revealed that span does depend on the category of chunks used (e.g., span is around seven for digits, around six for letters, and around 5 for words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For instance, span is lower for long than for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud, and on the lexical status of the contents (i.e., whether the contents are words known to the person or not).

Several other factors also affect a person's measured span, and therefore it is difficult to pin down the capacity of short-term or working memory to a number of chunks. Nonetheless, Cowan (2001) has proposed that working memory has a capacity of about four chunks in young adults (and less in children and old adults).

Miller's attempts to estimate the amount of information per word in conversational speech led him to Noam Chomsky, who showed him how the sequential predictability of speech follows from adherence to grammatical, not probabilistic, rules. The next decade was spent testing psychological implications of Chomsky's theories. Some of those ideas found expression in 1960 in "Plans and the Structure of Behavior," a book written jointly with E. Galanter and K. Pribram.