Kenneth Craik

Dr Kenneth James William Craik (K.J.W. Craik) (1914–1945) was a philosopher and psychologist.

He was born in Edinburgh on 29 March 1914, the son of James Craik a solicitor. The family lived at 13 Abercromby Place in Edinburgh's Second New Town. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy then studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He 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.

During the Second World War he served in the fire-fighting sections of the Civil Defence. Together with Gordon Butler Iles he made major advances on flight simulators for the RAF and did major studies on the effects of fatigue on pilots.

He died at the age of 31 following an accident, where a car struck his bicycle on the Kings Parade in Cambridge on the 7 May 1945. He died in hospital on the following day: V E Day. He is buried in the northern section of Dean Cemetery. His parents Marie Sylvia Craik and James Craik WS were later buried with him.

The Kenneth Craik Club (an interdisciplinary seminar series in the fields of sensory science and neurobiology) and the Craik-Marshal Building in Cambridge are named in tribute to Craik.

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.

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.