Textbook of Usability

1920 to 2012, USA · Founder of cognitive psychology; long-time professor at Princeton

Also known as: George Armitage Miller, G. A. Miller

George Armitage Miller was, with Jerome Bruner, one of the architects of the cognitive revolution that displaced behaviourism in the 1950s. His 1956 paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information is one of the most-cited papers in psychology. It argued, on the basis of converging evidence from absolute judgement and short-term memory tasks, that working memory holds about seven items at once, and introduced the concept of chunking as the mechanism by which experts pack more information into each item.

Although later research (notably Nelson Cowan's 2001 review) settled on a tighter limit of about four chunks, Miller's central insight, that human working memory is small and that interface design must respect this limit, remains the single most important claim a designer needs to internalise. His later work founded WordNet, the lexical database that became foundational for natural language processing in the decades before large language models.