George A. Miller, cognitive psychologist, dies at 92

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The onetime headmistress of an elite girls’ school fatally shot Dr. Herman Tarnower, her lover and the creator of the famous “Scarsdale Diet.” The killing generated front-page headlines and national debates about whether she was a feminist martyr or vengeful murderer. She was 89. Full obituary
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Bork was the conservative legal champion whose bitter defeat for a Supreme Court seat in 1987 politicized the confirmation process and changed the court’s direction for decades. He was 85. Full obituary | Photos
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The Hawaii Democrat was the second-longest-serving senator in U.S. history. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his World War II combat heroics. He was 88. Full obituary
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Shankar was already revered as a master of the sitar in 1966 when he met George Harrison, the Beatle who became his most famous disciple and gave the Indian musician-composer unexpected pop-culture cachet. He was 92. Full obituary | Photos
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Rivera defied the limits of genre and used her personal struggles in her songs, becoming a hero among Latin women in the U.S. and Mexico and a powerful player in a field dominated by machismo. She was 43. Full obituary | Photos
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Niemeyer, who loved curves in design and disliked right angles, shared architecture’s Pritzker Prize in 1988. He designed the major buildings that form the heart of Brazil’s capital, Brasilia. He was 104. Full obituary | Photos

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The New Hampshire senator co-authored a groundbreaking budget-balancing law, championed ethics and led a commission that predicted the danger of terrorist attacks years before 9/11. He was 82. Full obituary
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Though already a television star for his role on 1960s sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie,” Hagman is best known for playing villainous patriarch J.R. Ewing in the TV soap “Dallas.” In 1980, an estimated 300 million viewers in 57 countries saw J.R. get shot. Hagman was 81. Full obituary
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Former boxing champion Hector “Macho” Camacho fought a who’s who of legendary opponents stretching from Ray Mancini to Oscar De La Hoya. Known for flamboyance in the ring, he showed he understood the importance of selling a fight and employing some mental warfare. He was 50. Full obituary
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The inventive American composer whose music celebrated the intricacies of modern life helped define the American sound in the 20th century. He received two Pulitzer Prizes, the Sibelius Medal and the National Medal of the Arts. He was 103. Full obituary
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A rare author and screenwriter whose works appealed to highbrow readers and mainstream movie-goers, Ephron wrote fiction that was distinguished by characters who seemed simultaneously normal and extraordinary. Her hit movies include “Sleepless in Seattle,” “When Harry Met Sally...” and “Julie & Julia.” She was 71. Full obituary

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Dubbed “one of the true powerhouses of the pop music business” by Fortune magazine in 1986, the year she became BMI’s president and chief executive, Frances Williams Preston was a key figure in Nashville’s growth as a major music center, and nurtured the careers of numerous songwriters. She was 83. Full obituary

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The in-your-face rapper and bass player Adam Yauch, center, found fame in the transgressive, boundary-breaking trio the Beastie Boys. In later years, Yauch became a leading advocate for Tibetan independence. He was 47. Full obituary

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Born Thomas Austin Preston Jr., the colorful and quotable Amarillo Slim won the World Series of Poker in 1972 and began promoting the game on TV and in books. He brought the game “out of the back alleys,” one expert said. He was 83. Full obituary

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By Thomas H. Maugh II, Special to the Times

Aug. 6, 2012 12 AM PT

George A. Miller, an iconoclastic psychologist who played a crucial role in shifting his field from the study of behaviors to the direct examination of thought processes, died July 22 at his home in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 92 and died of complications of pneumonia and dementia.

And if you need to look up “iconoclastic,” you may find that the definition comes from WordNet, a massive online reference that Miller started in hopes of allowing computers to understand human language.

When Miller began his research in the early 1950s, psychologists believed that human thought processes could not be studied directly. Rather, they focused on behaviors and responses to stimuli, working primarily with animals. Miller disagreed.

“George believed that the human mind in all its aspects was interesting and worth studying,” said Christiane Fellbaum, a computer scientist who worked closely with him at Princeton University. “Believe it or not, that was revolutionary at the time.”

Miller, Jerome Bruner and Noam Chomsky were the leaders of the “cognitive revolution” that replaced behaviorism as the leading psychological approach to understanding the mind.

Although he published several books and many papers, Miller is probably best known for his 1956 paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” published in the journal Psychological Review. That paper has come to be one of the most frequently quoted works in the field — and, as Miller often said, one of the most frequently misquoted.

In a series of studies, he found that most people could retain, on average, only about seven “chunks” of information — words, numbers, names, etc. — in short-term memory at one time. Given a list of numbers or things, most people’s memories petered out “somewhere in the neighborhood of seven,” he wrote.

The actual numbers were about seven for numbers, six for letters and five for words. Also, the amount that could be retained was a function of whether words, for example, were known to the listener. Fewer foreign words could thus be retained.

The rules are different for long-term memory, however, where storage capacity seems to be largely unlimited.

Although Miller could find no physical basis for the limitation, he speculated that evolution favored humans who could remember “a little information about a lot of things” rather than “a lot of information about a small segment of the environment.”

Miller had a long interest in language. His 1951 book, “Language and Communication,” helped establish the field of psycholinguistics, which attempts to link the processes by which languages are acquired and used in cognitive processes.

Beginning in 1980, he helped in the creation of WordNet, a database of the English language that has been described as an electronic “Roget’s Thesaurus.” One of its goals was to provide more precise definitions of words that could help computers avoid confusion caused by words with similar sounds or meanings. The project was funded in large part by government agencies interested in improving machine translation of foreign languages.

WordNet has also been used in commercial search engines to disambiguate words for searches and to identify key words for advertising links.

George Armitage Miller was born on Feb. 3, 1920, in Charleston, W.Va., the son of a steel company executive. His parents divorced when he was a child.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in history and speech from the University of Alabama in 1940 and a master’s in speech from the same university in 1941. While at Alabama, he met and married Katherine James. She died in 1996 after 57 years of marriage.

During World War II, Miller did research on military voice communications at Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory for the Army Signal Corps, earning his doctorate in 1946.

He taught at Harvard, MIT and Rockefeller University before joining Princeton in 1979. In 1960, he and Bruner founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, which became a hotbed for the newly emerging science of cognitive psychology.

In 1991, PresidentGeorge H.W. Bushawarded him the National Medal of Science. In 1990, he received the American Psychological Foundation’s Life Achievement Award, and he has been the recipient of a variety of other honors.

The number seven also had a role in his personal life, according to his daughter, Nancy Saunders. She said he made his only hole in one at age 77 on the seventh green at the Springdale Golf Club in Princeton, using a seven iron.

Besides his daughter, Miller is survived by his second wife, Margaret; a son, Donnally; and three grandchildren.

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