A Tribute to Alan Wilkes - cognitive psychologist

I had to wait a few days before writing anything about Alan’s death, because I found myself more affected than I’d imagined. Which may seem odd because he had been very ill for a long time and, in any case, I hadn’t seen him for years. It will seem less so if I explain that he had, long since, managed to inhabit my thoughts and influence the way I saw the world. A good influence: I’m more than a bit better for having known him.

Alan Wilkes was pretty well the first person I met when I was washed up on the shores of the Tay. “Little Oxford by the Tay” the wags called it, because in those far-off days it was a College of the University of St Andrews and guilty of having pretensions. Queen’s College: not, of course, as spectacular as the one down south but, nonetheless, filled with scarily clever academics. I’d come from Melbourne, one of the largest psychology departments in the world with hundreds (or was it thousands?) of students and a tower block to accommodate numberless hoards of staff. To Dundee, which had a staff of five (or was it six?). Plus a couple of decidedly eccentric technicians, but that’s another story altogether.

I was shown round a rather Spartan room by Alan and promptly invited to dinner. There was a slight difficulty, he explained, because he lived over the river, but he told me where the ferry was and asked me to make my way to his house when I made landfall on the other side. No address was needed because his wife would be singing and it was only necessary to follow her voice. All odd enough to be true. And, indeed, true it was. Puccini got me there. The first of many an evening sitting in that famous bay window opposite the church, talking of this and that.

He was, of course, the “Wilkes” bit of Tajfel and Wilkes on stereotyping. I’d looked him up and already stood a little in awe, if only for the titanic effort involved in getting the data – there are no short-cuts in psychophysics. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this. I wonder whether the students of Queen’s College knew that they were being taught by the author of work of genuinely lasting worth. If it has taken fifty years for the world to notice the social consequences of categorial perception, don’t blame Alan Wilkes: he explained it all a long time ago.

We didn’t have a “professor” in those halcyon days. Our Principal, Sir Malcolm Knox, a rather austere Philosopher (whose main claim to fame, in my book, was his suppression of Collingwood’s work on Magic as “not properly philosophy”) harboured grave doubts as to whether psychology deserved a chair or even deserved a capital letter. He got his way and we had to wait until Queens’ College became the University of Dundee (somewhat perversely, the Tay got its bridge at about the same time). The new Professor was Stephen Griew, a devout Skinnerian. Frustrated to discover no one had told him there was no animal house in the department, he was ripe for intellectual ambush. I had a part in this, but Alan was the prime mover. Day after day we urged our new leader to acknowledge the Cognitive Revolution then underway. Ulric Neisser’s book Cognitive Psychology, had opened the way, we argued, to let the mind, mentation, and language back into the discipline – let Dundee lead the way.

Griew’s response was impressive. He invited Neisser to the department, and for a couple of giddy weeks – thanks to Alan Wilkes - students found themselves taught by perhaps the most famous psychologist on the planet. As if that were not enough, a rather bewildered Skinner himself arrived soon after and was invited to defend the ancien régime. He did his formidable best, but the tide was against him. In summary, in the late sixties and early seventies Alan played a pivotal role in a revolution that came to dominate psychology. The conference on “Long-Term Memory” that we organized together in 1973 represented perhaps the first clear statement of a certain kind of “Dundee psycholinguistics,” placing the emphasis on the psychology rather than the linguistics. (We took the delegates to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the rather cramped hall of Ledlanet House, where John Calder himself served wine at dinner).

I worked with Alan for twenty years. In the best of days, from opposite sides of a large desk we did little else but write and argue all day, trying to find something sensible to say about the psychological reality of linguistic rules. Now and then Professor Griew would tap the door to show visitors two academics at work. It felt a little like being in a zoo, but he was embarrassingly proud of his two Alans and easily forgiven. We took it in turns as “first author” in a series of published papers that were truly the product of a joint mind. You’ll ask were all those squabbles, all those deleted commas, worth the game?  I never asked Alan, but I think his answer would have been yes. Linguists are correct in asserting that people follow grammatical rules (even in Dundee) but that does not mean they necessarily use them – that’s a question for psychologists. We found that much out and it’s not nothing (to quote Joël Pynte). It was worth the effort.

The seventies found Alan working in a completely new domain, devising methods of addressing one of the intellectual Everests of the discipline: how does allusion work? Written texts place inferential demands on the reader, that much is obvious. But the problem is not that we continually associate one damn thing with another, but that we do it in such a controlled way, managing to draw inferences of just the right degree of specificity and depth. The exact nature of the “frame problem” has bedeviled research on text comprehension for years, as have the processes limiting inference (so-called “stop rules”). Indeed, the question could hardly be more pertinent at the dawn of the age of the chat bot. Alan’s research presents us with a new set of rather disquieting questions (I think he did not claim to have the answers: the questions were bad enough!). He demonstrated, for example, that readers simultaneously deploy contradictory chains of inference, resulting in their quite literally believing one or more incompatible “truths”.

You will find all this, and much more, set out in Alan’s monumental work Knowledge in Minds, a book which skillfully steers the perennial course between two schools of thought: to the right, what can be done with extrapolations from small-scale cognitive research (and he certainly saw eye movement measurement that way); to the left, how far you can take the all-embracing claims of social constructivism. I think he was a little disappointed that this book – the fruit of fifteen years or more of passionate research – was not an instant best-seller. He need not have worried, it is a lasting achievement. 

So far as I recall, Alan only had one substantial period of sabbatical leave. The Principal of the day, something of a tyrant, saw it as his duty to make things as difficult as possible and Alan secured his leave by rashly promising that all his courses would be covered. That’s how he came to ask me if I would deliver his first-year lectures. He provided meticulously prepared notes and I did the best I could (I recall Kahneman and Tversky featured large) but an exchange with a student in the lift after one lecture was revealing. She was repeating the year and had had the advantage of comparison. “It’s not the same, is it?” she said, managing a sympathetic smile. I knew what she meant: Alan was a charismatic teacher with the incidental advantage of good looks, a kindly manner and a warm baritone voice. You really can’t compete with that.

Alan took his sabbatical in Italy and returned with at least one memorable story. He disliked crowds and was sometimes uncharacteristically shy in company. He had found himself at some very grand affair dining off gold plates and seated next to an elderly Countess or some such (apparently they are thicker on the ground than in Dundee). Perhaps looking for a way to break the ice with this haughty neighbour, he set out to demonstrate how very sharp the table knives were and succeeded in stabbing himself through the hand. Perhaps some bewigged flunky rushed to staunch the wound; maybe the lady herself bound it up; I have no idea - all I recall is Alan’s smoky laugh telling the tale. He was not a man given to solemnity. Indeed, he tended to find a reason to smile in most things. Perhaps that was why he fell on snooker as a recreation. Not an entirely prudent choice for someone red-green colour blind, although I’m sure no one in his beloved Newport Club would dream of taking advantage.

You would find Alan at his best in the annual meetings of examiners. Dundee Psychology examinations in the Golden Age were unlike any you would find elsewhere. The work of each student was discussed, sometimes in considerable detail. Quite often answers were read out to allow the whole Board to see the point at issue. Facing intractable disagreement we looked for an arbiter and more often than not, the person chosen would be Alan Wilkes. Yes, because he could be relied on to be fair, but also because he simply knew a great deal more than most of us. Looking back, I recall waiting for him to return, clutching a disputed script. I cannot recall his decision being turned aside.

There was a period when our External Examiner was Jonckheere (like Brahms, he seemed not have a first name), the erudite and amiable inventor of Jonckheere’s Trend Test. He arrived, of course, after the squabbles of the internal Examination Board had been settled, although that particular year there remained some simmering dissent about a particular set of answers on the theoretical work of Jean Piaget. Now, Jonckheere had worked for a time in Geneva, where Piaget had famously forbidden him to leave unless he could find an “equally able replacement.” So, when we reached the name of this particular student, somebody explained that Alan had acted as arbiter on her scripts and asked whether the External would comment further. There ensued a fascinating discussion between “Jonck” (as we learned to call him) and Alan Wilkes. It went on for some time (indeed, I recall it continuing at dinner that evening), ending with the External gracefully admitting, “I think you know far more about this than me.”

In our later days, Alan and I shared many a bitter laugh as the blight of administrative sclerosis dimmed the lights of academe. Since neither of us fancied working in the dark we plotted our means of escape. To borrow Nick Wade’s apposite phrase, Wilkes was a bookman through and through, so it came as no surprise that he embarked on a second life: the bookshop in Newport, his thoughtful second home, listening to John Coltrane while packing orders, or exchanging words with many a soul in search of books and happier days.