The contributions of Walter Kintsch: Cascading cognitive science

ABSTRACT

Walter Kintsch’s contributions profoundly impacted research on the comprehension of text and discourse and on interdisciplinary cognitive science. Each of his theoretical advances produced a cascade of theoretical and empirical investigations by his own team and many other investigators, which validated and refined those advances. That pattern is examined here with reference to his proposals concerning the propositional representation of text, the construction-integration model, multidimensional situation models, and global memory search in text retrieval and comprehension. Walter’s remarkable insights regarding cognitive science inspired all those around him both in their research endeavors and beyond.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a REACH grant to the author from the Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba.