George Armitage Miller: biography of a pioneer of cognitive psychology.

This researcher helped the cognitivist paradigm to flourish, replacing behaviorism.

George A. Miller (1920-2012) was an American psychologist who contributed very relevant knowledge to psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Among other things, he analyzed how humans process the information we receive, and was the first to argue that our memory has the capacity to store up to seven differential items per moment.

Below is a biography of George A. we will see a biography of George A. Milleras 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 an advanced degree in history and speech, and a year later, in 1941, he received a master's degree in the same area. Both degrees were part of the University of Alabama program.

Finally, in 1946 D. in psychology from Harvard University..

As part of his activities at Harvard University, Miller collaborated with the Army Signal Corps during World War II. In fact, in 1943, Miller conducted military research related to the intelligibility of speech and sound; topics that he transferred years later in his studies on psycholinguistics.

Subsequently, 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.

He was also a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was also co-founder (along with Jerome S. Bruner) of the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies in 1960, and participated in the establishment of the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Harvard University. participated in the establishment of the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory in 1986. in 1986.

Thanks to his theories about short-term memory, Miller is recognized as one of the founders of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.. He also made relevant contributions to 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 when George A. Miller was a researcher in psychology (between 1920 and 1950), the behaviorist paradigm was booming. One of the things that behaviorism held 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. for empirical research in psychology.

Studies in short-term memory

Miller was interested in in measuring the mind's ability to establish channels for information processing.. From the research he conducted, he found that people could reliably associate between four and ten continuous stimuli.

For example noises, line lengths or a series of dots. 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 propositions: short-term memory in humans is not unlimited, but has the general capacity to store up to seven pieces of information. This capacity can also be modified depending on how subsequent processes are carried out, such as the recoding of information.

This is recognized to this day as one of the basic assumptions of information processing, precisely because it held 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 soundsor when we have to perceive an object by means of a disguised or very fast gaze.

Impact on psychology

Miller's proposals had a major impact on subsequent research in cognitive psychology, which eventually led to the development and validation of psychological tests. eventually led to the development and validation of psychometric tests for the study of memory for the study of memory and other cognitive processes.

It also made it possible to generalize the idea that it is important to limit the number of elements that are presented to a person when we want him/her 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 George A. Miller's most important works include Language and Communicationof 1951; Plans and Structure of Behavior1957; and The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limitations in Our Information Processing Capacity, 1956, which is perhaps the work that marked his beginnings as an information processor.of 1956, which is perhaps the work that marked his beginnings as a prestigious cognitive psychologist.

Bibliographical references:

• Doorey, M. (2018). George A. Miller. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved August 29, 2018. Available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-A-Miller.
• Pinker, S. (2012). George A. Miller (1920-2012). Obituaries. American Psychological Association. Retrieved August 29, 2018. Available at http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/miller_obituary.pdf.