Kenneth Craik
Kenneth James William Craik (/kreɪk/; 1914 – 1945) was a Scottish philosopher and psychologist.
A pioneer of cybernetics, he hypothesized that a human behaves basically as a servomechanism that controlled at discrete points in time.
[1] He influenced Warren McCulloch, who once recounted that Einstein considered The Nature of Explanation a great book.
[2] He was born in Edinburgh on 29 March 1914, the son of James Bowstead Craik, an Edinburgh lawyer, and Marie Sylvia Craik (née Robson), a published novelist.
The family lived at 13 Abercromby Place in Edinburgh's Second New Town (previously the home of William Trotter).
He then had a fellowship to St John's College, Cambridge in 1941, where he worked with Magdalen Dorothea Vernon and published papers with her about dark adaptation in 1941 and 1943.
He 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.
[5] He died at the age of 31 following an accident, where a car struck his bicycle on the Kings Parade in Cambridge on 7 May 1945.
The Kenneth Craik Club (an interdisciplinary seminar series in the fields of sensory science and neurobiology) and the Craik-Marshall Building in Cambridge are named in tribute to Craik.
The Kenneth Craik Research Award administered by St John's College was established in his memory in 1945.
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.
[10][11] In in this paper, he argued that the human is an intermittent servomechanism performing serial ballistic control.
In more detail, he hypothesized, based on multiple early experiments in human cognitive and motor control, that in motion planning, a human operates as a negative-feedback loop.
The selected action is then implemented by an open-loop controller that operate for ~0.2 seconds ("ballistic movement").
[12] current sensory information but then executed open-loop, i.e. without being influenced by feedback of the result.
He demonstrated the refractory nature of tracking following an initial response to an unpredicted, discrete step stimulus and proposed the ubiquitous nature of serial ballistic control in humans at a rate of two to three actions per second 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.
The Nature of Psychology: A Selection of Papers, Essays and Other Writings by Kenneth J. W. Craik.
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.
"An Asymmetric Relationship: The Spirit of Kenneth Craik and the Work of Warren McCulloch".
Retrieved 18 July 2014.. See especially section entitled "Cambridge and the influence of Kenneth Craik's engineering ideas" (pp.
"'Our Friends Electric': Mechanical Models of Mind in post-war Britain".
ISSN 0952-8229.. Husbands, Phil; Holland, Owen (September 2012).
"In the Theoretician's Laboratory: Thought Experimenting as Mental Modeling" (PDF).
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association.
The contemporary notion that mental modelling plays a significant role in human reasoning was formulated, initially, by Kenneth Craik in 1943.
London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.
"Mental models: concepts for human-computer interaction research" (PDF).
Although Johnson-Laird (1989) is generally credited with coining the term mental model, the history of the concept may be traced to Craik's (1943) work entitled The Nature of Explanation.
