American Philosophical Society
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1Name:  Dr. George A. Miller
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  1971
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  210. Behavioral Biology, Psychology, Ethology, and Animal Behavior
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1920
 Death Date:  July 22, 2012
   
 
George A. Miller was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University at the time of his death on July 22 at the age of 92. Born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1920, he received his B.A. degree from the University of Alabama in 1940 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University in 1946. During and after World War II, he studied speech production and perception at Harvard, and in 1948, inspired by E. Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, he conducted a series of experiments measuring how a listener's expectations influence his perceptions. Dr. Miller summarized that work in 1951 in "Language and Communication," a text that helped to establish psycholinguistics as an independent field of research in psychology. He subsequently tried to extend Shannon's measure of information to explain short-term memory, work that resulted in a widely quoted (and often misquoted) paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Dr. Miller's attempts to estimate the amount of information per word in conversational speech led him to Noam Chomsky, who showed him how the sequential predictability of speech follows from adherence to grammatical, not probabilistic, rules. The next decade was spent testing psychological implications of Chomsky's theories. Some of those ideas found expression in 1960 in "Plans and the Structure of Behavior," a book written jointly with E. Galanter and K. Pribram. In 1960 Dr. Miller co-founded, along with Jerome S. Bruner, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. On the basis of these activities, Dr. Miller is generally considered one of the fathers of modern cognitive psychology. Dr. Miller's research interests shifted from grammar to lexicon, and in 1976 "Language and Perception," written with P. N. Johnson-Laird, presented a detailed hypothesis about the way lexical information is stored in a person's long-term memory. Dr. Miller attempted to test some aspects of the hypothesis with studies of the development of language in young children; that project was summarized in 1977 in "Spontaneous Apprentices: Children and Language." During this time, he served as a consultant to the Sloan Foundation in the program that helped to create the new field of cognitive science, and in 1986, in collaboration with Gilbert Harman, he established the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory, and in 1990 he wrote "The Science of Words," which won the William James Book Award from Division 1 of the American Psychological Association. From 1989-94 he served as Program Director of the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience. His research has also produced WordNet, a lexical database that is widely used by computational linguists as part of natural language processing systems. In addition to his work on the facuties of Harvard and Princeton Universities, Dr. Miller had also taught at the University of Alabama, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rockefeller University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1962 and had served as president of the American Psychological Association. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1971. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1991.
 
Election Year
1971 (1)