Fergus Ian Muirden Craik FRS (born 17 April 1935, Edinburgh, Scotland) is a cognitive psychologist known for his research on levels of processing in memory.
[3] He attended Lockerbie Academy throughout his childhood and his parents enrolled him in George Watson's Boys’ College, in Edinburgh, at age 12.
He excelled in physics, english, and biological sciences which helped change his career aspirations upon graduating high school.
He completed his undergraduate thesis on the effect of rate of information processing on time perception, a topic that was heavily influenced by George Miller and his workings.
In 1960, Craik was offered a position at the Medical Research Council in London, England, to study how aging occurs.
This job allowed Craik to make connections with the Department of Psychology at the University of Liverpool in which he was accepted for graduate studies.
Following a NATO-sponsored meeting on memory in 1967, Craik was offered the opportunity to act as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto by fellow attendee and prominent psychologist, Endel Tulving.
At this time, Anne Treisman’s research from the 1960s influenced Craik as the concept of levels of perception formed the basis of her theory of attention.
Together, with Robert Lockhart, Craik co-wrote an article on the levels-of-processing that rivaled the previously accepted Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model at the time.
With the invention of functional neuroimaging and the University of Toronto’s acquisition of a PET scanner, Craik and many of his colleagues looked at the brain correlates involved in encoding and retrieving processes in memory.
With the use of functional imaging, in recent times, Craik is looking at how encoding and processing tasks in memory is activated in the brain.
[8] The role of the prefrontal cortex shows that deeper-level encoding is self-generated and strategic process that would not be able to progress without this highly developed region.
Craik's research also highlighted posterior cortical regions as the area responsible for lower level processing.
Age-related memory problems become more persistent in the elderly years, and one's ability to recall previously encoded stimuli without cues or context is no longer optimal.
[9] Still, there is an increased level of activity in the left prefrontal cortex when older adults undergo some nonverbal tasks of retrieval when compared to younger individuals.