The scientific study of the mind and mental processes is called cognitive psychology. It includes attention, perception, learning, memory, language, reasoning, conceptual development, and decision making. Among the founders of cognitive psychology is George Armitage Miller.
Miller was born in Charleston, West Virginia on February 3, 1920. Shortly after, his Father George E. Miller and mother Florence (Armitage) Miller divorced. Miller was then raised by only his mother during the Great Depression. He graduated from Charleston High School in 1937 and relocated to Washington D.C. with his mother and stepfather where he attended George Washington University for a year. His family practiced Christian science, where instead of medical science they…show more content… Being a member of the drama club is what introduced his interest in speech along with the influence of Professor Donald Ransdell who introduced Miller to psychology. For two years he taught an Introduction to Psychology class at Alabama. In 1943 he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Harvard University, where he received his doctorates From Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory in 1946 under the supervision of Stanley Smith Stevens doing military voice communications research for the Army during World War II.
In 1948 he was ordained assistant professor in psychology. He developed a course on language and communication that lead to his first major book in 1951, Language and Communications. It is believed to be a foundational work in psycholinguistics. He then became an associate professor of psychology at MIT. He identified the minimal voice features of speech required for it to be intelligible through his work on voice communication and human engineering. William James gave psychologists the idea that our minds consisted of long-term and short-term memory. Although it was expected that short-term memory was
