George Armitage Miller Biography

George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of the cognitive psychology field. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics and cognitive science in general. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he insightfully observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited in both psychology and the wider culture. He also won awards, such as the National Medal of Science.