George A. Miller just passed away. Many people consider his 7 +/- 2 paper to be the first step in the “cognitive revolution” of the 60s in which Cognitive Psychology came to be a major principle of psychology (replacing behaviorism to some extent, at least until the emergence of behavioral neuroscience).
However, his role in inspiring the original paradigm for the study of implicit learning is probably not well-known. That story I know courtesy of my father who told it to me something like this — it’s probably mangled due to memory (mine) and retelling (his) but the basic outline should be right:
[via A.S. Reber, personal communication]
I was at graduate school at Brown University [mid 60s] and I was bored out of my mind. None of the research going on around me was remotely interesting to me and I needed to find something. I met a woman at a party and we hit it off and it turned out she was George Miller’s daughter. She invited me to come visit the family up in Boston, where George was at Harvard at the time. The relationship didn’t go anywhere, but George and I hit it off famously. We talked and I ended up coming to visit him periodically to talk and also to see what research he was working on.
He was trying to study the idea of a Universal Grammar in language learning, probably influenced by Chomsky as a lot of people were. He had developed a paradigm with a simplified finite-state grammar and was observing people trying to learn it by trial and error, watching patterns and then predict the next item in the sequence. I looked at what he was doing and thought he was doing it wrong. I tried to tell him, but of course he wouldn’t listen to me. So I went back to grad school and ran it myself. The result was the first Artificial Grammar Learning paper in 1967 where we coined the term “implicit learning.”
I found out about his passing through an email from the Cognitive Neuroscience society. That email includes this quote:
“If any person deserves credit for creating the field of cognitive psychology as it has developed in the past roughly 60 years,” the linguist and philosopher Chomsky said in an interview, Dr. Miller is “the one.”
And a link to a NY Times article:
“If any person deserves credit for creating the field of cognitive psychology as it has developed in the past roughly 60 years,” the linguist and philosopher Chomsky said in an interview, Dr. Miller is “the one.”“If any person deserves credit for creating the field of cognitive psychology as it has developed in the past roughly 60 years,” the linguist and philosopher Chomsky said in an interview, Dr. Miller is “the one.”
If you would like to read more about George Miller please go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/us/george-a-miller-cognitive-psychology-pioneer-dies-at-92.html?pagewanted=all