Summary
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) model in Comprehension: 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
- ^ "Walter Kintsch's home page". Colorado.edu.
- ^ "Walter Kintsch, PhD". Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences. 30 August 2016.
- ^ "Professor Emeritus Walter Kintsch passes away". University of Colorado Boulder. 20 April 2023. Retrieved 28 January 2024.
- ^ Goldman, S. R.; Varma, Sashank (1995). CAPping the construction-integration model of discourse comprehension: Essays in honor of Walter Kintsch. Erlbaum. pp. 337–358.
{{cite book}}:|website=ignored (help) - ^ "APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions". APA.org.
- ^ "Gallery of Scientists". FABBS. 23 August 2016.
- ^ Slamecka, Norman J. (1978). "Review of Memory and Cognition": 141–145. doi:10.2307/1421833. JSTOR 1421833.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - ^ Waskan, Jonathan A (December 1999). "Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition". Philosophical Psychology. 12 (4): 537–540.