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Walter Kintsch

Walter Kintsch (May 30, 1932 – March 24, 2023) was an American psychologist and academic who was Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder (United States).^[1] He was renowned for his groundbreaking theories in cognitive psychology, especially in relation to text comprehension.

Biography[edit]

Walter Kintsch was born in Timișoara, raised in Austria and received his PhD at the University of Kansas in 1960.^[2] He died on March 24, 2023, at the age of 90.^[3]

Research[edit]

His research focus has been on the study of how people understand language, using both experimental methods and computational modeling techniques. He formulated a psychological process theory of discourse comprehension that views comprehension as a bottom-up process in which various alternatives are explored in parallel, resulting in an incoherent intermediate mental representation that is then cleaned up by an integration process. Integration is a constraint satisfaction process that ensures that those constructions that are linked together become strongly activated, whereas contradictory and irrelevant elements become deactivated.^[4] Kintsch details the Construction-Integration (CI) modelinComprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition.

Awards[edit]

• In 1992 he won the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology.^[5]
• He is honored by the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences as one of the "scientists who have made important and lasting contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior".^[6]
• He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2001.

Selected publications[edit]

• Learning, Memory and Conceptual Processes, Wiley, 1972, (ISBN 978-0471480716)
• Memory and Cognition, Wiley, 1977, (ISBN 978-0471480723)^[7]
• Kintsch, Walter; van Dijk, Teun A. (September 1978). "Toward a model of text comprehension and production". Psychological Review. 85 (5): 363–394. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.85.5.363. S2CID 1825457.
• Kintsch, Walter (1988). "The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model". Psychological Review. 95 (2): 163–182. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.95.2.163. PMID 3375398.
• Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition, Cambridge University Press, 1998, (ISBN 978-0521629867)^[8]
• The Representation of Meaning in Memory, Erlbaum, 1974. Reprinted, Routledge 2014, Kindle eBook, 2014

References[edit]