Walter Kintsch

Walter Kintsch was born in Timișoara, raised in Austria and received his PhD at the University of Kansas in 1960.[2]

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.[3] Kintsch details the Construction-Integration (CI) model in Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition.

• In 1992 he won the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology.[4]
• 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".[5]
• He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2001.

• Learning, Memory and Conceptual Processes, Wiley, 1972, (ISBN 978-0471480716)
• Memory and Cognition, Wiley, 1977, (ISBN 978-0471480723)[6]
• 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, (ISBN 978-0521629867)[7]
• The Representation of Meaning in Memory, Erlbaum, 1974. Reprinted, Routledge 2014, Kindle eBook, 2014