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
The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University o ...
(
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
). He was renowned for his groundbreaking theories in
cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...
, especially in relation to
text comprehension.
Biography
Walter Kintsch was born in
Timișoara
Timișoara (, , ; , also or ; ; ; see #Etymology, other names) is the capital city of Timiș County, Banat, and the main economic, social and cultural center in Western Romania. Located on the Bega (Tisza), Bega River, Timișoara is consider ...
, raised in
Austria
Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...
and received his PhD at the
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States. Two branch campuses are in the Kansas City metropolitan area on the Kansas side: the university's medical school and hospital ...
in 1960. He died on March 24, 2023, at the age of 90.
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
APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology.
*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
The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public university, public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany.
The university was established by Frederick William III of Prussia, Frederick W ...
in Berlin in 2001.
Selected publications
* ''Learning, Memory and Conceptual Processes'', Wiley, 1972, ()
* ''Memory and Cognition'', Wiley, 1977, ()
*
*
* ''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
1932 births
2023 deaths
University of Colorado Boulder faculty
University of Kansas alumni
Discourse analysts
People from Timișoara
APA Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology recipients