George Miller

George A. Miller (1920-2012) was one of the founders of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. His 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" is one of the most cited papers in psychology, establishing that the capacity of short-term memory (now working memory) is limited to approximately 7 ± 2 items — or more precisely, 7 ± 2 "chunks," where a chunk is a meaningful unit whose size depends on knowledge and expertise. This paper demonstrated that human information processing has measurable, predictable limitations.

Key Structures

• Expertise — The superior performance exhibited by individuals with extensive experience in a domain, characterized by rich knowledge structures, automatized skills, and qualitatively different problem representat.
• Working Memory — A limited-capacity system for temporarily holding and manipulating information during complex cognitive tasks such as reasoning, comprehension, and learning.
• Herbert Simon — A Nobel laureate and polymath who pioneered artificial intelligence and the study of bounded rationality — showing that human decision-making is rational within the limits of cognitive capacity.
• Short-Term Memory — A limited-capacity store that holds a small amount of information in an active, readily accessible state for a brief period, typically 15-30 seconds without rehearsal.
• Semantics — The study of meaning in language — how words, phrases, and sentences convey meaning, and how the mental lexicon organizes and represents meaning.
• Allen Newell — A pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive science who co-created the General Problem Solver and developed unified theories of cognition through the SOAR cognitive architecture.
• Noam Chomsky — The linguist whose revolutionary theory of generative grammar and devastating critique of behaviorism helped launch the cognitive revolution and transformed the study of language and mind.

Key Functions

• Discovered the capacity limit of short-term memory ('The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two').
• co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard.
• pioneer of psycholinguistics and information processing.

Founding the Cognitive Revolution

Miller's 1960 book Plans and the Structure of Behavior (co-authored with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram) proposed the TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) unit as the fundamental building block of behavior, replacing the stimulus-response reflex of behaviorism with a feedback-based control structure. On September 11, 1956, at the MIT Symposium on Information Theory, presentations by Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Allen Newell and Herbert Simon converged on the idea that mental processes could be studied scientifically — a date often cited as the birthday of cognitive science.