George Armitage Miller - Career

Career

After receiving his doctorate, Miller stayed as a research fellow at Harvard, continuing his research on speech and hearing. He was appointed assistant professor of psychology in 1948. The course he developed on language and communication would eventually lead to his first major book, Language and communication (1951). He took a sabbatical in 1950, and spent a year as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, pursuing his interest in mathematics. In 1951, Miller joined MIT as an associate professor of psychology. He led the psychology group at MIT Lincoln Lab. He worked on voice communication and human engineering, identifying the minimal voice features of speech required for it to be intelligible. Based on this work, in 1955, he was invited to a talk at the Eastern Psychological Association. That presentation, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two", was later published as a paper which went on to be a legendary one in Cognitive Psychology.

Miller moved back to Harvard as a tenured associate professor in 1955 and became a full professor in 1958, expanding his research into how language affects human cognition. At the university he met a young Noam Chomsky, another of the founders of cognitive science. They spent a summer together at Stanford training the faculty, and their two families sharing a house. In 1958–59, Miller took leave to join the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California, (now at Stanford University). There he collaborated with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram on the book Plans and the Structure of Behavior. In 1960, along with Jerome S. Bruner, he co-founded the Center for Cognitive Sciences at Harvard. The cognitive term was a break from the then-dominant school of behaviorism, which insisted cognition was not fit for scientific study. The center attracted such notable visitors as Jean Piaget, Alexander Luria and Chomsky. Miller then became the chair of the psychology department.

In 1967, Miller taught at Rockefeller University for a year, as a visiting professor, researching how lexical memory was stored, but declined a position as professor in experimental psychology. A new president's selection at Rockefeller made him leave. In 1979, he moved to Princeton as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology. In 1986 he helped in founding the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton. Eventually he became a professor emeritus and senior research psychologist at Princeton. He also directed the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Science.

Miller had honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex (1984), Columbia University (1980), Yale University (1979), Catholic University of Louvain (1978), Carnegie Mellon University (in humane letters, 2003), and an honorary DSC from Williams College (2000). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957, the National Academy of Sciences in 1962, the presidency of the Eastern Psychological Association in 1962, the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1969, and to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. Miller was the keynote speaker at the first convention of the Association for Psychological Science in 1989. He was a Fulbright research fellow at Oxford University in 1964–65, and in 1991, received the National Medal of Science.