Michael Scaife (24 March 1948 – 18 December 2001) was a British biologist, psychologist, and reader at the

University of Sussex The University of Sussex is a public university, public research university, research university located in Falmer, East Sussex, England. It lies mostly within the city boundaries of Brighton and Hove. Its large campus site is surrounded by the ...

, known for his early work in developmental psychology and his later interdisciplinary study in cognitive and computing sciences.

Jerome Bruner Jerome Seymour Bruner (October 1, 1915 – June 5, 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory (education), learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was ...

and

Andy Clark Andy Clark, (born 1957) is a British philosopher who is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Prior to this, he was a professor of philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotla ...

.
Obituary: Michael Scaife
" in: ''The Guardian,'' 8 February 2002. Accessed 13-04-2015. Clark, Andy. ''Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension.'' Oxford University Press, 2008.

Biography

Born in

Lincolnshire Lincolnshire (), abbreviated ''Lincs'', is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the East Midlands and Yorkshire and the Humber regions of England. It is bordered by the East Riding of Yorkshire across the Humber estuary to th ...

and raised in

Coventry Coventry ( or rarely ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands (county), West Midlands county, in England, on the River Sherbourne. Coventry had been a large settlement for centurie ...

, Scaife attended the King Henry VIII grammar school on a scholarship, and obtained his MA in biology at

University of Liverpool The University of Liverpool (abbreviated UOL) is a Public university, public research university in Liverpool, England. Founded in 1881 as University College Liverpool, Victoria University (United Kingdom), Victoria University, it received Ro ...

, and his PhD in psychology at

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. Scaife started his academic career as research assistant at the ethology group of the University of Oxford, where he cooperated with Mike Cullen,

Nikolaas Tinbergen Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen ( , ; 15 April 1907 – 21 December 1988) was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning the ...

and

Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an Oxford fellow, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Simonyi Professor for the Publ ...

. Later in the 1970s at University of Oxford he participated in the education and cognition research group of

, with whom he published the article "The capacity for joint visual attention in the infant" in ''

Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...

'' in 1975. According to

Bruner Bruner is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: *Al Bruner (1923–1987), cofounder of Global TV * Bud Bruner (1907–1996), American boxing manager *Carlton Bruner (born 1972), American swimmer * Charlotte H. Bruner (1917–1999), A ...

and

Clark Clark is an English language surname with historical links to England, Scotland, and Ireland, ultimately derived from the Latin ''clericus'' meaning "scribe", "secretary" or a scholar within a religious order, referring to someone who was educated ...

their cooperation helped "revolutionise the study of the infant mind. The target was to unravel what was involved in a child's learning to master a culture and the technology it generates. Mike knew that this problem was all about interactions. He saw that spectators could never get to the gist of things. It was through interacting that you learned how to do things - and also what needed doing." Later in the 1980s he moved to the

, where he became senior lecturer in 1999, and reader in 2001. In 1987 at Sussex University he had co-founded the school of cognitive and computing sciences. Also with his partner Yvonne Rogers he founded the Interact Lab to study representation in problem solving.

Selected publications

Books

* Butterworth, George, Julie Rutkowska, and Michael Scaife. ''Evolution and developmental psychology.'' Vol. 4. Harvester, 1985.

Articles

* Scaife, Michael, and Jerome S. Bruner. "The capacity for joint visual attention in the infant." ''Nature'' (1975). * Scaife, Mike, and Yvonne Rogers.
External cognition: how do graphical representations work?
" International journal of human-computer studies 45.2 (1996): 185–213. * Scaife, M., Rogers, Y., Aldrich, F., & Davies, M. (1997, March).
Designing for or designing with? Informant design for interactive learning environments
" In ''Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems'' (pp. 343–350). ACM. * Navarro-Prieto, Raquel, Mike Scaife, and Yvonne Rogers. "Cognitive strategies in web searching." ''Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Human Factors & the Web.'' 1999. * Cheng, Peter C-H., Ric K. Lowe, and Mike Scaife. "Cognitive science approaches to understanding diagrammatic representations." ''Artificial Intelligence Review'' 15.1-2 (2001): 79–94.

References

External links

Obituary: Michael Scaife
The Guardian {{DEFAULTSORT:Scaife, Michael 1948 births 2001 deaths British cognitive scientists Human–computer interaction researchers Alumni of the University of Liverpool Alumni of the University of Oxford Academics of the University of Sussex People from Lincolnshire 20th-century British psychologists