Information Processing (IP)
Biography
George A. Miller was born February 3, 1920, in Charleston, West Virginia. In 1940 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Alabama and in 1946 he received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard, Rockefeller, and Princeton universities. He is known for his work in cognitive psychology, particularly communication and psycholinguistics. At Harvard, during and after World War II, he studied speech production and perception. As of this writing (April, 2009) Dr. Miller is a James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at Princeton University.
Theory
Princeton University's George Miller co-authored a landmark book in 1960, called Plans and the Structure of Behavior. (co-authored with Karl Pribram and Eugene Galanter, 1960). This book marked a transition away from animal experimentation of the behaviorists and toward human research in learning. The theory put forth by these authors is called the Information Processing Theory of Learning (IP). It resembled Tolman's ideas about cognitive maps and elaborated on the notion of cybernetic recursive loops. Information processing used a computer model to understand human cognition.
George A. Miller provided two theoretical ideas that are fundamental to the information processing framework and cognitive psychology. The first concept is `chunking' and the capacity of short term (working) memory. Miller (1956) presented the idea that short-term memory could only hold 5-9 chunks of information (seven plus or minus two) where a chunk is any meaningful unit. A chunk could refer to digits, words, chess positions, or people's faces. The concept of chunking and the limited capacity of short term memory became a basic element of all subsequent theories of memory.
Miller's second great contribution was the concept of information processing, using a computer model of human learning. The human mind takes in information, performs operations on it to change its form and content, stores and locates it and generates responses to it, all functions which are similar to the way digital computers input and process. Thus, processing involves gathering and representing information, or encoding; holding information or retention; and getting at the information when needed, or retrieval. A central idea is that information processing takes place as a series of sequential steps. Information processing theorists approach learning primarily through a study of memory.
In this model, an "image" is the accumulated organized knowledge the learner has about himself and the world. A "plan" was any hierarchical process in the organism that could control the order in which a sequence of operations would be performed, like a computer software program. "Strategies" and "tactics" are units in the organization of behavior. "Execution" represents control sequences of operations.
Miller and his colleagues proposed a model for identifying units of behavior called TOTE's. (Test - Operate - Test - Exit). These are operational feedback units that function within a self-regulated system. According to the model, an individual could have numerous TOTE's. Before a behavior can occur, there must first be some input that starts the TOTE. Then there must be criteria for testing the input; usually this is a comparison with some internal standard (T). Next there must be some response or operational mechanism (O) for dealing with incongruities. When the input does not match the internal standard, some action must be taken and the Test against the internal standard is repeated (T). The TOTE will continue to cycle through iterations of TOT until the incongruity is resolved. Once resolution of incongruities is accomplished, the individual exits the loop with a resultant behavior that is based on congruity (E).
Miller also produced landmark work on short term memory. He proposed that information is organized into units or "chunks", and the limitations on short term memory apply to the number of chunks an individual can hold in consciousness at one time. Chunks can have variable size, and the number of chunks humans can hold in short-term memory is 7 + 2. This idea is the basis of grouping numbers such as phone numbers or social security numbers into small groups to make them easier to remember and work with.
Dr. Miller is the senior research psychologist and principal investigator of WordNet. WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Learning Theory Bibliography
Miller, G.A. (1956). 81-97.
Miller, G.A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K.H. (1960).
Sahakian, 1976