Nicholas Mackintosh was interviewed by David Lubinski at the 2013 meeting in Melbourne, Australia.

Nicholas Mackintosh, who died in 2015, was one of Britain’s most distinguished experimental psychologists. He took his degrees at Oxford and, after posts at Dalhousie and Sussex, led the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge for two decades.

He first made his name studying animal learning, where his work on how animals learn what to attend to produced an influential model of associative learning that still carries his name. In the later part of his career he turned to human intelligence, and his textbook IQ and Human Intelligence became a standard, widely admired for weighing contentious evidence with unusual care and fairness.

A Fellow of the Royal Society, Mackintosh insisted that questions about intelligence be settled by evidence rather than ideology. This interview, recorded in Melbourne not long before his death, stands as an enduring record of his contributions to the field.