George Miller
(1920-2012)
George Miller was one of the founders of cognitive psychology in the 1950's, which replaced the dominant behaviorist psychology of
John B. Watson and
B.F. Skinner.
He challenged the behaviorist idea that the mind/brain is a black box only understandable through its inputs (stimuli) and outputs (responses). Psychological science must be limited to measuring observable behaviors. Cognition itself is not a proper subject, accessible only through subjective introspection. Miller argued that the brain and mind could be studied scientifically and quantitatively.
In his most famous paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" Miller thought he could measure the "channel capacity" of the mind, in
Claude Shannon's sense of a communication channel, as limited to seven (plus or minus two) "chunks" of information.
Miller claimed that people can hold about seven items in immediate memory, can quickly give about seven different labels for colors, and can rapidly identify a number of dots without counting them up to around seven.
In 1960 he co-founded and co-directed the
Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University with
Jerome Bruner of the Department of Social Relations.
Miller partnered with
Noam Chomsky, another founder of cognitive psychology, to assess Chomsky's theory of a "deep structure" in the brain underlying grammar in all human languages.
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