George A. Miller (1920-2012) was one of the founders of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. His 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" is one of the most cited papers in psychology, establishing that the capacity of short-term memory (now working memory) is limited to approximately 7 ± 2 items — or more precisely, 7 ± 2 "chunks," where a chunk is a meaningful unit whose size depends on knowledge and expertise. This paper demonstrated that human information processing has measurable, predictable limitations.
Founding the Cognitive Revolution
Miller's 1960 book Plans and the Structure of Behavior (co-authored with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram) proposed the TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) unit as the fundamental building block of behavior, replacing the stimulus-response reflex of behaviorism with a feedback-based control structure. On September 11, 1956, at the MIT Symposium on Information Theory, presentations by Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Allen Newell and Herbert Simon converged on the idea that mental processes could be studied scientifically — a date often cited as the birthday of cognitive science.
Miller's later career focused on language and semantics. He created WordNet, a large lexical database of English that organizes words into networks of semantic relationships (synonymy, hypernymy, meronymy). WordNet became a foundational resource for computational linguistics and natural language processing. Miller also co-founded the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory and was instrumental in establishing cognitive science as an interdisciplinary field bridging psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy.