George Armitage Miller: Biography Of A Pioneer Of Cognitive Psychology
George A. Miller (1920-2012) was an American psychologist who contributed highly relevant knowledge to psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Among other things, he analyzed how human beings process the information we receive, and was the first to maintain that our memory has the capacity to store up to seven differential elements per moment.
Next we will see a biography of George A. Miller as well as some of his main contributions to cognitive psychology.
George A. Miller: biography of a cognitive psychologist
George Armitage Miller, better known as George A. Miller, was born on February 3, 1920 in Charleston, United States. In 1940 he received a bachelor’s degree in history and speech, and a year later, in 1941, he earned a master’s degree in the same area. Both degrees were part of the University of Alabama program.
Finally in 1946 earned a doctorate in psychology from Harvard University
As part of his activities within the latter institution, Miller collaborated in the US Army Signal Corps during World War II. In fact, in 1943, Miller conducted military research related to the intelligibility of speech and sound; themes that he transferred years later in his studies on psycholinguistics.
Later, he worked as a teacher and researcher at the same university, as well as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rockefeller University. Years later, in 1979, he began academic activities at Princeton University, where he was recognized as professor emeritus in 1990.
Likewise, he was a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Likewise, he was co-founder (along with Jerome S. Bruner) of the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, in 1960, and participated in the establishment of the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory in 1986.
Thanks to his theories on short-term memory, Miller He is recognized as one of the founders of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience Likewise, he made relevant contributions in psycholinguistics and human communication studies, which earned him the Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology award from the American Psychological Association (APA).
From the behaviorist paradigm to cognitive psychology
During the years in which George A. Miller worked as a psychology researcher (between 1920 and 1950), the behaviorist paradigm was on the rise. One of the things that behaviorism maintained was that the mind could not be studied scientifically, since it was not an entity whose reality was observable.
In other words, for behaviorism, there was no possibility of scientifically studying mental processes, because they are states and operations that cannot be directly observed.
Miller, on the other hand, argued that the behaviorist paradigm could be very limiting. From his perspective, Mental phenomena could constitute a legitimate object of study for empirical research in psychology.
Studies in short-term memory
Miller was interested in measure the mind’s ability to establish information processing channels From the research he conducted, he realized that people could reliably associate between four and ten continuous stimuli.
For example noises, line lengths or a series of points. People could quickly identify the stimulus as long as there were seven or fewer, and they could retain between five and nine items in immediate memory.
With this he developed one of his greatest proposals: short-term memory in humans is not unlimited, but rather has the general capacity to store up to seven pieces of information. Likewise, this capacity can be modified depending on how subsequent processes are carried out, such as information recoding
The above is recognized to this day as one of the basic assumptions of information processing, precisely because it maintained that human memory can only efficiently capture a total of seven units at the same time (plus or minus two additional pieces of information)..
For example, the latter occurs when when we have to distinguish between different sounds or when we have to perceive an object through a hidden or very quick glance.
Impact on psychology
Miller’s proposals had an important impact on subsequent research in cognitive psychology, which finally led to the development and validation of psychometric tests for the study of memory and other cognitive processes.
Likewise, it allowed us to generalize the idea that it is important to limit the number of elements that are presented to a person when we want them to retain certain information (for example, the digits of a number or the number of stimuli that make up a presentation, etc.).
Outstanding works
Some of the most important works of George A. Miller are Language and communication1951; Plans and structure of behavior, 1957; and The magic number seven, plus or minus two: some limitations on our ability to process information from 1956, which is perhaps the work that marked his beginnings as a prestigious cognitive psychologist.
