PERSON
George Armitage Miller
American cognitive psychologist (1920–2012) whose 1956 discovery of the
seven-item limit of working memory became the most cited finding in the history of psychology — and whose framework for
chunking and
recoding remains the most precise vocabulary available for analyzing what AI compression changes and what it leaves untouched.
George Armitage Miller was born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1920 and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1946. He held faculty positions at Harvard, MIT, Rockefeller University, and Princeton, where he spent the final decades of his career. His 1956 paper 'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Estimates of Our Capacity for Processing Information' became the most cited article in the history of psychological science and established the concept of working memory limits that would influence fields ranging from interface design to telecommunications to artificial intelligence. Alongside Noam Chomsky and Jerome Bruner, Miller was a founding architect of the cognitive revolution that displaced behaviorism as psychology's dominant paradigm. He co-founded Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies in 1960, pioneered the psycholinguistic study of language processing, and later led the development of WordNet, a landmark computational lexical database at Princeton. He received the National
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