On This Day.... 7th May 

Kenneth Craik (1914–1945) 

By Professor John Mollon 

Today, 7th May, marks the 75th anniversary of a fatal accident that changed the course of Psychology in Cambridge. It was the eve of V.E. Day and the centre of Cambridge was filled with celebrating crowds. Kenneth Craik (photo on the right) was cycling to his College, St John’s, which that evening was holding its annual dinner in memory of St John the Evangelist. On King’s Parade – in those days a main thoroughfare – he was knocked off his bicycle by a car door opened in front of him and he was thrown under a passing lorry. When the news reached St John’s, the dinner had already started, and Frederic Bartlett – Director of the Psychological Laboratory and fellow Johnian – made his way through the cheerful crowds to the original Addenbrooke’s Hospital (in Trumpington St) where Craik later died without regaining consciousness.

It was widely taken for granted that Kenneth Craik would be Bartlett’s successor. He was already the first Director of the MRC Applied Psychology Unit – the predecessor to the CBU but then housed within the Psychological Laboratory on the Downing Site. In his early work in sensory psychology, Craik introduced the concept of the eye as a range-setting instrument: the retina can operate over light levels that vary by ten orders of magnitude, but at any one time we are able to make fine discriminations only around the light level to which we are currently adapted. 

During the war, owing to his unique talents in designing and constructing analogue equipment, Craik was endlessly in demand for advice on problems of night vision, of instrument displays, of visual search for aircraft and submarines, and of the control of gunnery. Especially remarkable was the ‘Cambridge Cockpit’, a flight simulator, intended for selection and training and designed by Craik using sophisticated non-linear, analogue feedback systems. In a prescient paper published in Nature in October 1944, Craik set out his vision of the tasks of the MRC Unit in a post-war world: ‘suiting the job to the man, suiting the man to the job, and improving the man’s performance’. He foresees many of the problems that were to occupy Experimental Psychology in the following decades. 

But perhaps most influential of all was Craik’s view of human beings as information-processing systems, a commonplace view today but not so in the 1940’s. In particular, Craik introduced the idea of internal models of the external world that could be manipulated to guide our future actions. Kenneth Craik was only 31 at the time of his death, but he was already immortal.