Kenneth Craik

Psychologist, Author

1914 – 1945

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Who was Kenneth Craik?

Kenneth James Williams Craik was a philosopher and psychologist who studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1940. He then had a fellowship to St John's College, Cambridge in 1941, and was appointed to be the first director of the Medical Research Council's Cambridge-based Applied Psychology Unit in 1944.

In 1943 he wrote The Nature of Explanation. In this book he first laid the foundation for the concept of mental models, that the mind forms models of reality and uses them to predict similar future events. He was thus one of the earliest practitioners of cognitive science.

He was killed at the age of 31 in a bicycle accident.

In 1947 and 1948 his two-part paper on the "Theory of Human Operators in Control Systems" was published posthumously by the British Journal of Psychology. An anthology of Craik's writings, edited by Stephen L. Sherwood, was published in 1966 as The Nature of Psychology: A Selection of Papers, Essays and Other Writings by Kenneth J. W. Craik.

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Born
1914
Also known as
  • Kenneth James Williams Craik
Profession
Education
  • University of Edinburgh
  • University of Cambridge
Died
1945

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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