Valerie F. Reyna

Reyna received her B.A in Psychology from Clark University (Summa Cum Laude) in 1976. She continued her education at Rockefeller University, completing her PhD in Experimental Psychology with qualifications in Linguistics and in Statistics in 1981.[7] After a post-doctoral fellowship at Educational Testing Service, Reyna joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas where she remained until 1987. Subsequently, Reyna joined the faculty of the University of Arizona and was promoted to Professor in 2000 while affiliated with the Departments of Surgery, Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, Mexican-American Studies, and Women's Studies. Reyna moved to the University of Texas at Arlington in 2003 as Professor of Psychology. Professor of Human Development at Cornell University since 2005, she is the director of the Human Neuroscience Institute, the co-director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research and the co-director for the Cornell University Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility at Cornell.[8]

Reyna's research program adopts a cognitive neuroscience perspective on topics pertaining to judgement, decision making, and memory over the life span. In collaborative work with Brainerd, Reyna focused on how emotions can distort memories, especially for events that have negative emotions associated with them.[9] To account for why people often remember things that never happened (i.e., experience false memory or memory illusions), fuzzy-trace theory proposes that verbatim and gist memories are stored separately and activated in parallel. Verbatim memory stores a detailed representation of the event at the same time as gist memory captures its general features. After a couple of days, the representation stored in verbatim memory is typically lost, while the gist remains accessible and can be further interpreted.[10] Reyna and Brainerd have suggested adults make connections and rely on their gist memory to a greater extent than children, making them more susceptible to false memories under some circumstances (e.g., in experiments using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm).[11] Their research findings challenge the widely held view that susceptibility to memory distortion declines from childhood into adulthood, and have implications for research on the reliability of eyewitness testimony.[12]

In applications of fuzzy-trace theory to risky decision making, Reyna and her colleagues distinguish "rational" decision-making, involving deliberate analysis of trade offs between risks and benefits, and nondeliberative reactions, in which the gist of the situation cues action.[13] As youth develop into adolescents and young adults, they are increasingly likely to rely on intuitive gist-based responding, and less likely to engage in rational consideration of risks.[14] Rayna disagrees with the view that adolescents underestimate risks and have a sense of invulnerability. Rather, it is their tendency to respond intuitively to contextual cues and their motivation to maximize immediate pleasure that leads adolescents to engage in risky behaviors involving sexual activity, reckless driving, smoking, drug and alcohol use, and the like.

• Reyna, V. F.; Brainerd, C. J. (1995). "Fuzzy-trace theory: An interim synthesis". Learning and Individual Differences. 7 (1): 1–75. doi:10.1016/1041-6080(95)90031-4.
• Reyna, V. F.; Farley, F. (2006). "Risk and rationality in adolescent decision making: Implications for theory, practice, and public policy". Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 7 (1): 1–44. doi:10.1111/j.1529-1006.2006.00026.x. PMID 26158695.
• Reyna, V. F.; Nelson, W. L.; Han, P. K.; Dieckmann, N. F. (2009). "How numeracy influences risk comprehension and medical decision making". Psychological Bulletin. 135 (6): 943–973. doi:10.1037/a0017327. PMC 2844786. PMID 19883143.

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