Kenneth Craik

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Kenneth Craik (1914-1945) was a philosopher and psychologist who studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and 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.

In 1943 he wrote The Nature of Explanation. In this book he 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 one of the earliest practitioners of cognitive science.

He was tragically killed at the young age of 31 in a bicycle accident.

In 1947, the two-part paper "Theory of Human Operators in Control Systems" was published posthumously by the British Journal of Psychology; this paper introduced the concept of intermittent control in the context of human control systems.