| Walter Kintsch | |
| Birth Date: | 30 May 1932 |
| Birth Place: | Timișoara, Timiș County, Romania |
| Nationality: | American |
| Education: | University of Kansas (PhD) |
| Awards: | APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology (1992) |
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 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]
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.