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Birth
He was born in Edinburgh on 29 March 1914, the son of James Craik a solicitor and Marie Sylvia Craik. The family lived at 13 Abercromby Place in Edinburgh’s Second New Town -
eduacation
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. -
Cambridge Cockpit
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 Royal Air Force and did major studies on the effects of fatigue on pilots. https://www.youtube.com/create_channel -
The Nature of Explanation
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 -
death
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. -
Theory of Human Operators in Control Systems
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
