Walter Kintsch
American psychologist and academic (1932–2023)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.[1] He was known for his theories in cognitive psychology, especially in relation to text comprehension.
- Psychologist
- academic
Walter Kintsch | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 30, 1932 Timișoara, Timiș County, Romania |
| Died | March 24, 2023 (aged 90) |
| Education | University of Kansas (PhD) |
| Occupations |
|
| Awards | APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology (1992) |
Biography
Research
His research focus was on 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 constructions that are linked together become strongly activated, whereas contradictory and irrelevant elements become deactivated.[5] Kintsch details the Construction-Integration (CI) model in Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition.[6]
Awards
In 1992 he won the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology.[7]
He was 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".[3]
He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2001.[2]
Selected publications
Books
- Learning, Memory and Conceptual Processes, Wiley, 1972 (ISBN 978-0471480716)[8]
- Memory and Cognition, Wiley, 1977 (ISBN 978-0471480723)[9]
- Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition, Cambridge University Press, 1998 (ISBN 978-0521629867)[10]
- The Representation of Meaning in Memory, Erlbaum, 1974 (ISBN 978-0-470-48074-8)[11]
Articles
- 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.