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.
Walter Kintsch | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 30, 1932 Timișoara, Timiș County, Romania |
| Died | March 24, 2023 (aged 90) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Kansas (PhD) |
| Occupations |
|
| Awards | APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology (1992) |
Biography
editWalter 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
editHis 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.