Walter Kintsch (born 1932) is an American
Professor Emeritus of
Psychology at the
University of Colorado Boulder (
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
). He is renowned for his groundbreaking theories in
cognitive psychology, especially in relation to
text comprehension.
Early life
Walter Kintsch was born in
Timișoara
), City of Roses ( ro, Orașul florilor), City of Parks ( ro, Orașul parcurilor)
, image_map = Timisoara jud Timis.svg
, map_caption = Location in Timiș County
, pushpin_map = Romania#Europe
, pushpin_ ...
, raised in
Austria
Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
and received his PhD at the
University of Kansas in 1960.
Research
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. Kintsch details the
Construction-Integration (CI) model in ''Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition''.
Awards
*In 1992 he won the
.
*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".
*He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the
Humboldt University
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiati ...
in Berlin in 2001.
Selected publications
* ''Learning, Memory and Conceptual Processes'', Wiley, 1972, ()
* ''Memory and Cognition'', Wiley, 1977, ()
* Toward a model of text comprehension and production, Psychological Review, 1978, 85, pp. 363–394
* The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension : a construction-integration model, Psychological Review, 1988, vol 95, pp. 163–182
* ''Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition'', Cambridge University Press, 1998, ()
* The Representation of Meaning in Memory, Erlbaum, 1974. Reprinted, Routledge 2014, Kindle eBook, 2014
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kintsch, Walter
Living people
University of Colorado Boulder faculty
1932 births
University of Kansas alumni
Discourse analysts