The psychological investigation was in a sort of slot in 1955 when George A. Miller, a Harvard professor, presented a report entitled "The magical number seven, plus or minus two", which helped to trigger an explosion of new ideas and thinking about opening a new field of research known as cognitive psychology .
The dominant form of psychological study, while behaviorism, had rejected Freud's theories of "mind" as too intangible, vaguely mystical and verifiable. Its researchers have studied the behavior in the laboratory, observation and recording of the test subjects' responses to stimuli administered with care. Mainly, we studied mice.
Dr. Miller, who died July 22 at his home in Plainsboro, New Jersey, for 92 years, has revolutionized the world of psychology, which shows in his article that the human mind, although invisible, can also be observed and tested in the laboratory.
"George Miller, more than anyone, deserves credit for the existence of the modern science of mind", the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, and the author said in an interview. "He certainly was one of the most influential psychologists of the XXI century experimental 20".
Dr. Miller borrowed a test pattern of the emerging science of computer programming in early 1950 to demonstrate that the short-term memory in humans, when faced with the unknown, could absorb around seven new things at once.
When asked to repeat a random selection of letters, words or numbers, he wrote, people are stuck "somewhere in the neighborhood of seven years."
Some may remember the new list items, some less than seven years. But part of what they remember, words color words, foods, numbers with decimal numbers, no decimals, the consonants, vowels, seven was the average statistics for the short-term storage. (Long-term memory, cognitive formula that has followed another, was almost unlimited.)
Dr. Miller could not say why he was seven. He suggested that survival may have helped early humans could keep "some information about a lot of things" rather than "a lot of information about a small segment of the environment."
But this, he concluded, was the point. He had expressed an idea that became a touchstone for cognitive science: that whatever the brain, was an information processor, to systems that obey mathematical rules, which could be studied .
Dr. Miller, who was trained in behaviorism, was the first of many researchers and theorists to question the scientific principles in 1950. He and a colleague, Jerome S. Bruner, has named the new field of research, when he established a laboratory of his own psychology, the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard in 1960. Only the word "cognitive", considered a taboo among the behaviorists, that marked a break with the old school.
"Using" cognitive "was an act of defiance," Dr. Miller wrote in 2006. "For someone raised in respect of reductionist science," cognitive psychology "has made an accurate statement. This meant that I was interested in the mind."
This new approach to psychological research has come to be known as the cognitive revolution.
The first and most long-term interest as a scientist, Dr. Miller was the language. His first book "Language and Communication" (1951), is widely considered a key work in psycholinguistics, the study of how people learn, invent and use language.
He has worked with the linguist Noam Chomsky's revolutionary papers on mathematical language and computer problems involved in interpreting the syntax.
He conducted some early experiments on how people understand words and phrases, the speech of the information technology-based recognition. "Plans and the structure of behavior" (1960), written with Eugene Galanter and Karl H. Pribram was an attempt to synthesize the research of Amnesty International with psychological research on how humans act - essentially, a book on how to build better robots.
Since 1986, he oversaw the development of WordNet, an electronic database of reference designed to help computers understand human language.
His colleagues said they had a role in many of his boldest thoughts of the time on the human mind and artificial, in general, then moved to other projects.
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