Psychologist invented modern ‘science of the mind’

Psychological research was in a kind of rut in 1955 when George A. Miller, a professor at Harvard, delivered a paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” which helped set off an explosion of new thinking about thinking and opened a new field of research known as cognitive psychology.

The dominant form of psychological study at the time, behaviourism, studied behaviour in laboratories, observing and recording test subjects’ responses to carefully administered stimuli. Mainly, they studied rats.

Miller, who died on July 22 at his home in Plainsboro, N.J., at the age of 92, revolutionized the world of psychology by showing in his paper that the human mind, though invisible, could also be observed and tested in the lab.

“George Miller, more than anyone else, deserves credit for the existence of the modern science of mind,” the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker said in an interview. “He was certainly among the most influential experimental psychologists of the 20th century.”

Miller borrowed a testing model from the emerging science of computer programming in the early 1950s to show that humans’ shortterm memory, when encountering the unfamiliar, could absorb roughly seven new things at a time. When asked to repeat a random list of letters, words or numbers, he wrote, people got stuck “somewhere in the neighbourhood of seven.”

Miller could not say why it was seven. But that, he concluded, was beside the point. He had articulated an idea that was to become a touchstone of cognitive science: that whatever else the brain might be, it was an information processor, with systems that obeyed mathematical rules, that could be studied.

Miller, who was trained in behaviourism, was among the first of many researchers and theorists to challenge its scientific principles in the 1950s. He and a colleague, Jerome S. Bruner, gave a name to the new research field when they established a psychology lab of their own, the Center for Cognitive Studies, at Harvard in 1960. Just by employing the word “cognitive,” considered taboo among behaviourists, they signalled a break with the old school. That new approach to psychological research came to be known as the cognitive revolution.

Miller conducted some of the first experiments on how people understand words and sentences, the basis of computer speech-recognition technology. Colleagues said he had a role in framing many of his era’s most audacious thoughts about human and artificial thinking; typically, he then moved on to other projects.

George Armitage Miller was born on Feb. 3, 1920, in Charleston, W.Va., the only child of Florence and George Miller, who divorced when he was a child. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English and speech, Miller received his master’s degree and Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard.

He taught at Harvard beginning in 1955, heading its psychology department from 1964 until 1967. He joined the faculty of Princeton in 1979, founded the Cognitive Science Laboratory there and became a professor emeritus in 1990.