Professor Nicholas Mackintosh

Nicholas John Mackintosh, Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of the Royal Society since 1987, sadly passed away on 8th February 2015 after a short illness. Through recent years he has been a great asset to The Psychometrics Centre as one of our Distinguished Associates and has always been willing to help and offer support when asked. He has had a very long and distinguished career as a scientist, having received the Biological Medal and the President's Award from the British Psychological Society in 1984 and 1986 respectively. Nick was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and from 1981 until 2002 Head of the Department of Psychology. He has traveled widely, having been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Pennsylvania, California (at Berkeley), Hawaii, New South Wales and Yale.  Nick's work in Barcelona has shown that true spatial or locale learning is not quite distinct from simple associative learning, as originally claimed by O'Keefe and Nadel (1978). His work has been honoured by the Universitat de Barcelona with an e-book dedicated to his legacy.

www.publicacions.ub.edu/ficha.aspx?cod=08515. 

Nick has authored many seminal books that have had, and continue to have, an impact on the way people think about issues such as intelligence and animal learning. These have included 'The Psychology of Animal Learning' (1974) and 'Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed' (1995), but his ground-breaking work 'IQ and Human Intelligence', published in 1998, represented the turning of the tide in attitudes in the UK, both academic and public, towards the need to remedy underachievement in inner-city multiethnic schools as well as a recognition of the important role thatpsychology had played and would continue to play in addressing these social issues.