George A. Miller, born in 1920, began his career in college as a speech and English major. In 1941, he received his masters in speech from the University of Alabama. In 1946 he received his PhD from Harvard and began to study psycholinguistics.

In 1951, he published his first book, titled Language and Communication.  In it, he argued that the behaviorist tradition was insufficient to the task of explaining language.

He wrote his most famous paper in 1956:  "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two:  Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information."  In it, he argued that short-term memory could only hold about seven pieces -- called chunks -- of information:  Seven words, seven numbers, seven faces, whatever.  This is still accepted as accurate.

In 1960, Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with famous cognitivist developmentalist, Jerome Bruner.  In that same year, he published Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram, 1960), which outlined their conception of cognitive psychology.   They used the computer as their model of human learning, and used such analogies as information processing, encoding, and retrieval.  Miller went so far as to define psychology as the study of the mind, as it had been prior to the behaviorist redefinition of psychology as the study of behavior!

George Miller served as the president of APA 1969, and received the prestigious National Medal of Science in 1991.  He is still teaching as professor emeritus at Princeton University.