Fergus Craik

Fergus Ian Muirden Craik (born 1935 in Edinburgh, Scotland) is a cognitive psychologist known for his research on levels of processing in memory. He studied psychology at the University of Edinburgh, took his doctorate at the University of Liverpool in 1965, taught at Birkbeck College in London and moved to the University of Toronto in 1971, later becoming a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest. With Robert Lockhart he argued in 1972 that how well something is remembered depends on how deeply it was processed at encoding, a view that challenged the Atkinson-Shiffrin multi-store model, and a 1975 follow-up with Endel Tulving supplied further evidence. In later work he used brain imaging to study encoding and retrieval and examined how memory, attention and cognitive function change with age. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a recipient of the Killam Prize for Science.