Kenneth Craik

File:13 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh.jpg

13 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh

File:The grave of Kenneth Craik, Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.jpg

The grave of Kenneth Craik, Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh

Kenneth James William Craik (/kreɪk/; 1914–1945) was a Scottish philosopher and psychologist. A pioneer of cybernetics, he hypothesized that any human behaves basically as a servomechanism that executes control at discrete points in time. He influenced Warren McCulloch, who once recounted that Einstein considered The Nature of Explanation a great book.

Life

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

Craik's work was admired and considered as an important influence by several early researchers in cybernetics. When the Ratio Club of early British cyberneticians was founded in 1949, its founder, neurophysiologist John Bates, expressed his disappointment that he was unable to invite the already-deceased Craik. It had been proposed to name the club after him; "had he survived, there is no doubt Craik would have been a leading member of the club" (according to Husbands and Holland). Several members had worked or interacted with Craik, including W. Grey Walter who credited a wartime talk with Craik with inspiring his pioneering "tortoise" robots. In 1947 Walter described early North American cyberneticians including Norbert Wiener, McCulloch and Arturo Rosenblueth as "thinking on very much the same lines as Kenneth Craik did, but with much less sparkle and humour.". (In turn Bates and club member W. E. Hick considered that Craik had been influenced by Ratio Club member Albert Uttley.) In the proposal document for the influential 1956 Dartmouth workshop on artificial intelligence, Nathaniel Rochester discusses the problem of machine learning in terms of a model of learning from The Nature of Explanation.

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.

Works

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 is recognized as one of the pioneers of modern cognitive science.

File:Feedback loop with descriptions.svg

A servomechanism negative-feedback loop.

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. 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 human continuously takes in sensory information, but does not continuously perform actions. Instead, once every ~0.5 seconds, the human selects an action. The selected action is then implemented by an open-loop controller that operate for ~0.2 seconds ("ballistic movement"). As the human learns, the motion performed by the open-loop controller becomes more refined, allowing the human system to approach an ideal continuous-time servomechanism.

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. Craik.

Bibliography

Craik, K. J. W. (January 1939). "The effect of adaptation upon visual acuity". British Journal of Psychology. General Section. 29 (3): 252–266. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1939.tb00917.x.

Craik, K. J. W.; Zangwill, O. L. (October 1939). "Observations relating to the threshold of a small figure within the contour of a closed-lined figure". British Journal of Psychology. General Section. 30 (2): 139–150. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1939.tb00948.x.

Craik, K. J. W.; Vernon, M. D. (July 1941). "The nature of dark adaptation". British Journal of Psychology. General Section. 32 (1): 62–81. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1941.tb01010.x.

Craik, K. J. W.; Vernon, M. D. (January 1942). "Perception during dark adaptation". British Journal of Psychology. General Section. 32 (3): 206–230. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1942.tb01021.x.

Craik, Kenneth J. W. (1943). The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521094450. Retrieved 16 July 2014. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)

Craik, Kenneth J. W. (December 1947). "Theory of the human operator in control systems. I: The operator as an engineering system". British Journal of Psychology. General Section. 38 (2): 56–61. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1947.tb01141.x. PMID 18917476.

Craik, Kenneth J. W. (March 1948). "Theory of the human operator in control systems. II: Man as an element in a control system". British Journal of Psychology. General Section. 38 (3): 142–148. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1948.tb01149.x. PMID 18913657.

Craik, Kenneth J. W. (1966). Sherwood, Stephen L. (ed.). The Nature of Psychology: A Selection of Papers, Essays and Other Writings by Kenneth J. W. Craik. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521134804. Retrieved 16 July 2014.

Further reading

BMJ editors (26 May 1945). "Dr. Kenneth James William Craik [Obituary]". The British Medical Journal. 1 (4403): 752–753. PMC 2057427. {{cite journal}}: |author= has generic name (help)

Bartlett, F. C. (16 June 1945). "Dr. K. J. W. Craik [Obituary]". Nature. 155 (3946): 720. doi:10.1038/155720a0. Retrieved 17 July 2014.

Bartlett, F. C. (May 1946). "Kenneth J.W. Craik, 1914 – 1945 [Obituary]". British Journal of Psychology. General Section. 36 (3): 109–116. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1946.tb01113.x. Retrieved 17 July 2014.. 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.

Bartlett, Sir Frederic (October 1951). "The Bearing of Experimental Psychology upon Human Skilled Performance". British Journal of Industrial Medicine. 8 (4): 209–17. doi:10.1136/oem.8.4.209. PMC 1037340. PMID 14878955.

Collins, Alan F. (September 2012). "An Asymmetric Relationship: The Spirit of Kenneth Craik and the Work of Warren McCulloch". Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 37 (3): 254–268. Bibcode:2012ISRv...37..254F. doi:10.1179/0308018812Z.00000000020. S2CID 218669410.

Collins, Alan F. (May 2013). "The reputation of Kenneth James William Craik". History of Psychology. 16 (2): 93–111. doi:10.1037/a0031678. PMID 23527535.

Gregory, Richard L. (2001). "Adventures of a Maverick". In Bunn, Geoff; Lovie, A. D.; Richards, G. (eds.). Psychology in Britain: Historical Essays and Personal Reflections. Leicester, UK: British Psychological Society. pp. 381–392. ISBN 978-1-85433-332-2. Archived (PDF) from the original on 20 September 2013. Retrieved 18 July 2014.. 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).

Hayward, Rhodri (2001). "'Our Friends Electric': Mechanical Models of Mind in post-war Britain". In Bunn, Geoff; Lovie, A. D.; Richards, G. (eds.). Psychology in Britain: Historical Essays and Personal Reflections. Leicester, UK: British Psychological Society. pp. 290–308. ISBN 978-1-85433-332-2.. See especially pp. 295–299 for an extended analysis of Craik, with many quotes and references.

Hayward, Rhodri (December 2001). "Kenneth Craik (1914–1945)" (PDF). The Psychologist. 14 (12): 631. ISSN 0952-8229..

Husbands, Phil; Holland, Owen (September 2012). "Warren McCulloch and the British Cyberneticians" (PDF). Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 37 (3): 237–253. Bibcode:2012ISRv...37..237H. doi:10.1179/0308018812Z.00000000019. S2CID 145563943. Retrieved 17 May 2026.

Nersessian, Nancy J. (1992). "In the Theoretician's Laboratory: Thought Experimenting as Mental Modeling" (PDF). PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. 1992 (2): 291–301. doi:10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1992.2.192843. S2CID 141149408. Retrieved 17 July 2014. The contemporary notion that mental modelling plays a significant role in human reasoning was formulated, initially, by Kenneth Craik in 1943.

Reynolds, L. A.; Tansey, E. M., eds. (2003). The MRC Applied Psychology Unit. Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine. Vol. 16. London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. ISBN 978-085484-088-5. OL 25422751M. Retrieved 18 July 2014.

Staggers, Nancy; Norcio, A.F. (1993). "Mental models: concepts for human-computer interaction research" (PDF). International Journal of Man-Machine Studies. 38 (4): 587–605. doi:10.1006/imms.1993.1028. Retrieved 17 July 2014. 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.

Zangwill, O. L. (February 1980). "Kenneth Craik: The man and his work". British Journal of Psychology. 71 (1): 1–16. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1980.tb02723.x. PMID 6988028.

Zangwill, O. L. (2004). "Craik, Kenneth James William". In Gregory, Richard L. (ed.). The Oxford Companion to the Mind (second ed.). Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 224–225. ISBN 978-0-19-866224-2.. Entry reprinted verbatim from first edition (1987), pp. 169–170: Template:ISBN

External links

• "Ten things you might not know about psychology". The British Psychological Society. Archived from the original on 7 October 2013. Retrieved 17 July 2014. 6. Research by British psychologists on aircraft cockpit design has led to a reduction in air accidents (Craik, 1940).
• Strangeways, Simon (22 January 2013). "Historic overview:Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit". Cambridge, UK: Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Archived from the original on 17 July 2014. Retrieved 17 July 2014. Kenneth Craik, the [Applied Psychology] Unit's first director, was a pioneer in the use of computation as a theoretical model for human information processing, developing what was probably the very first computational model of skill and applying it to the wartime task of gun-aiming.