Kenneth Craik

Kenneth James William Craik (K.J.W. Craik) (1914–1945) 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.

Bibliography

. The most substantial biographical source to date, first published in the St. John's College (Cambridge, UK) The Eagle (March 1945) and included in S.L. Sherwood's 1966 edition of Craik's writings, The Nature of Psychology.

. See especially section entitled "Cambridge and the influence of Kenneth Craik's engineering ideas" (pp. 382–383 of book; pp. 2–4 of author's self-archived PDF).

. See especially pp. 295–299 for an extended analysis of Craik, with many quotes and references.

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. Entry reprinted verbatim from first edition (1987), pp. 169–170: ISBN 0-19-866124-X