Valerie F Reyna
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3602683 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Valerie F Reyna |
| PRENOMES | Valerie F |
| SOBRENOME | Reyna |
| ASSINATURA | REYNA V F |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2851-5797 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 64 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 263 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 62 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1980 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Virtually the same? A comparison between in-person and virtual mock jury deliberations
OBJECTIVE: Courts have dramatically increased their use of virtual jury trials, but empirical research has yet to examine differences between in-person and virtual jury deliberations. HYPOTHESES: We tested competing hypotheses that in-person juries would be better (or worse) than virtual juries in terms of attention and engagement, deliberation, and diversity. METHOD: = 30). RESULTS: = 0.66), and more educated (φ = .14) than in-person jurors, alt…
Framing, Fairness, and Ambiguity in Plea Decisions and Other Risky Choices
Three scholars take interdisciplinary perspectives on plea decision‐making, which resolves more than 95% of criminal cases. Wolfe (2025) draws out lessons from findings in medical decision‐making research and explains how findings and theory bridge domains. Wilson (2025) draws out lessons from behavioral economics for plea decision‐making and explains how perceptions of fairness could influence plea bargaining beyond economics, providing novel pr…
Framing Biases in Plea Bargaining Decisions in Those With and Without Criminal Involvement
About 95% of criminal convictions in the United States are obtained through plea decisions, a growing global practice. Courts justify these convictions based on defendant choice—defendants, as rational agents, can freely choose to plead guilty or go to trial. However, a fundamental axiom of rational choice—descriptive invariance—has never been effectively tested for plea decisions. To test this axiom, we manipulated gain–loss framing of plea opti…
How Decision Making Develops
This paper reviews the developmental literature on decision making, discussing how increased reliance on gist thinking explains the surprising finding that important cognitive biases increase from childhood to adulthood. This developmental trend can be induced experimentally by encouraging verbatim (younger) versus gist (older) ways of thinking. We then build on this developmental literature to assess the developmental stage of artificial intelli…
The power of meaningful numbers
OBJECTIVE: A mock jury experiment tested the effects of attorney guidance and jury deliberation to mitigate the challenges that civil juries face in assessing damages. HYPOTHESES: We hypothesized that two types of attorney guidance (per diem, per diem + lump sum), theoretically based in the Hans-Reyna model of jury decision making, would improve jury decision making compared with no guidance against five key benchmarks: injury assessment, validit…
Theoretical explanations of developmental reversals in memory and reasoning
Guiding jurors’ damage award decisions
Theory and practitioner “scaling” advice informed hypotheses that guidance to mock jurors should (a) increase validity (vertical equity), decrease variability (reliability), and improve coherence in awards; (b) improve subjective experience of jurors’ decision-making (rated helpfulness, confidence, and difficulty); and (c) have the greatest impact when it includes both verbal and numerical benchmarks. Three mock juror experiments (N = 197 student…
How fuzzy-trace theory predicts development of risky decision making, with novel extensions to culture and reward sensitivity
Socioeconomic status and concussion reporting
Improving health outcomes for concussed athletes and others requires self‐reporting symptoms; not reporting risks second‐impact syndrome and death. However, concussions in adolescents and young adults are often underreported. We treat reporting as a risky decision, extending predictions of fuzzy‐trace theory (FTT). We hypothesize that low SES indirectly interferes with the development of cognitive skills that reduce unhealthy risky decision makin…
How representations of number and numeracy predict decision paradoxes
Higher numeracy has been associated with decision biases in some numerical judgment‐and‐decision problems. According to fuzzy‐trace theory, understanding such paradoxes involves broadening the concept of numeracy to include processing the gist of numbers—their categorical and ordinal relations—in addition to objective (verbatim) knowledge about numbers. We assess multiple representations of gist, as well as numeracy, and use them to better unders…
Age Effects in Sequence-Construction for a Continuous Cognitive Task
We address potential methodological concerns, discuss theoretical implications, and consider potential real-life applications
Pumps and Prompts for Gist Explanations in Tutorial Dialogues About Breast Cancer
Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT) generalizes research on discourse to predict how health messages can be better understood and remembered, thereby influencing decision making. Applying FTT, BRCA Gist delivers messages interactively through tutorial dialogues and is the first Intelligent Tutoring System designed to help laypeople make sound medical decisions. Previous research indicates that BRCA Gist helps people form useful “gist explanations,” which le…
Developmental reversals in false memory
We report the 1st example of a true complementarity effect in memory development-a situation in which memory for the same event simultaneously becomes more and less accurate between early childhood and adulthood. We investigated this paradoxical effect because fuzzy-trace theory predicts that it can occur in paradigms that produce developmental reversals in false memory, which are circumstances in which adults are more likely than children to rem…
Too young to plead? Risk, rationality, and plea bargaining’s innocence problem in adolescents
Beyond stereotypes of adolescent risk taking
Recent neuroscience models of adolescent brain development attribute the morbidity and mortality of this period to structural and functional imbalances between more fully developed limbic regions that subserve reward and emotion as opposed to those that enable cognitive control. We challenge this interpretation of adolescent development by distinguishing risk-taking that peaks during adolescence (sensation seeking and impulsive action) from risk …
Preferences for Temporal Sequences of Real Outcomes Differ Across Domains but do not Vary by Age
After considering potential methodological limitations, theoretical contributions and implications for real-life decisions are discussed
On Judgments of Approximately Equal
Although precision is often important in quantitative judgment, sometimes, it is valuable to recognize that two quantities are roughly the same. Fuzzy‐trace theory suggests that approximately equal judgments rely on gist representations (i.e., meaningful fuzzy categories of quantity). We conducted three experiments to investigate approximately equal judgments with number pairs presented in different formats, both with and without semantic content…
Logical but incompetent plea decisions
The Gist of Delay of Gratification
Delay of gratification captures elements of temptation and self-denial that characterize real-life problems with money and other problem behaviors such as unhealthy risk taking. According to fuzzy-trace theory, decision makers mentally represent social values such as delay of gratification in a coarse but meaningful form of memory called "gist." Applying this theory, we developed a gist measure of delay of gratification that does not involve quan…
Fuzzy-trace theory and lifespan cognitive development
The gist of juries
Despite the importance of damage awards, juries are often at sea about the amounts that should be awarded, with widely differing awards for cases that seem comparable. We tested a new model of damage award decision making by systematically varying the size, context, and meaningfulness of numerical comparisons or anchors. As a result, we were able to elicit large differences in award amounts that replicated for 2 different cases. Although even arb…
Effective Ways to Communicate Risk and Benefit
Avoiding misunderstanding of health risk and benefit communications is a major challenge in medicine and public health [1]. Everyone is capable of reading or hearing every word presented, understanding each one, and yet grasping nothing of the meaning of the message [2]. Thus, it is critical that health messages are designed with an understanding of how people process health information and consequently make medical decisions
Endorsement of a personal responsibility to adhere to the minimum drinking age law predicts consumption, risky behaviors, and alcohol-related harms
Despite minimum drinking age laws, underage college students engage in high levels of risky drinking and reach peak lifetime levels of alcohol dependence. A group of presidents of universities and colleges has argued that these laws promote disrespect for laws in general, and do not prevent drinking or related negative consequences. However, no study has investigated the policy-relevant question of whether students who endorse a personal responsi…
Children’s competence or adults’ incompetence
Dual-process theories have been proposed to explain normative and heuristic responses to reasoning and decision-making problems. Standard unitary and dual-process theories predict that normative responses should increase with age. However, research has focused recently on exceptions to this standard pattern, including developmental increases in heuristic or intuitive responses. Developmental trends for normative and heuristic responses were inves…
Opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 for vaccination decisions
How numeracy influences risk comprehension and medical decision making
We review the growing literature on health numeracy, the ability to understand and use numerical information, and its relation to cognition, health behaviors, and medical outcomes. Despite the surfeit of health information from commercial and noncommercial sources, national and international surveys show that many people lack basic numerical skills that are essential to maintain their health and make informed medical decisions. Low numeracy disto…
Fuzzy‐trace theory and framing effects in choice
In the first section of this paper, we analyze classic framing effects according to principles of fuzzy‐trace theory. The key principle of the theory is that reasoning prefers to operate on simple gist, as opposed to exact details. Then, we introduce new data in three experiments designed to test this fuzzy‐processing assumption. In the first experiment, framing effects were conserved when numerical information was omitted from standard problems,…
Individual Differences in Numeracy and Cognitive Reflection, with Implications for Biases and Fallacies in Probability Judgment
Despite evidence that individual differences in numeracy affect judgment and decision making, the precise mechanisms underlying how such differences produce biases and fallacies remain unclear. Numeracy scales have been developed without sufficient theoretical grounding, and their relation to other cognitive tasks that assess numerical reasoning, such as the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), has been debated. In studies conducted in Brazil and in …
Development of gist versus verbatim memory in sentence recognition
Fuzzy-trace theory is used to explore children's memory and comprehension of sentences describing spatial or linear relationships. Recognition tests were given immediately and after a week's delay, and test sentences'truth, wording (original or novel), and premise-inference status were varied. When children were instructed to recognize only verbatim sentences (Experiment 1), premise recognition (memory) was independent of systematic misrecognitio…
Mere memory testing creates false memories in children
It has been reported that initial recall tests inoculate true memories against forgetting without creating false memories. This is not true of recognition tests. In 2 experiments with 5- and 8-year-olds, initial recognition tests elevated children's false-memory responses (false alarms to unpresented distractors) on delayed tests. In Experiment I, false-memory creation exceeded true-memory inoculation in 5-year-olds, producing net losses in accur…
Can age × learnability interactions explain the development of forgetting
Although recent developmental studies have identified robust age differences in forgetting rates, these differences may be artifacts caused by confounding age with an underlying relationship between forgetting rates and children's learning abilities. This possibility was examined in some experiments that implemented path-analytic causal modeling. None of the path analyses supported the artifactual hypothesis. On the contrary, there were strong ca…
Semantic coherence and fallacies in estimating joint probabilities
In three experiments on joint probability estimation, gist representations were manipulated with analogies, and the suboptimal strategy of ignoring relevant denominators was counteracted with training in using 2 × 2 tables to clarify joint probability estimates. The estimated probabilities of two events, as well as their conjunctive and disjunctive probabilities, were assessed against two benchmarks, logical fallacies and semantic coherence—a con…
Learning rate, learning opportunities, and the development of forgetting
Reported developmental declines in forgetting rates may be artifacts of correlated individual differences in learning rates or in the number of learning opportunities that children receive. This possibility was investigated in 2 experiments by using causal models that implemented possible relationships among age, forgetting rates, learning rates, and learning opportunities. The artifact hypothesis was disconfirmed. Forgetting rates declined marke…
Semantic Coherence and Inconsistency in Estimating Conditional Probabilities
Two studies examined semantic coherence and internal inconsistency fallacies in conditional probability estimation. Problems reflected five distinct relationships between two sets: identical sets, mutually exclusive sets, subsets, overlapping sets, and independent sets (a special case of overlapping sets). Participants estimated P(A), P(B), P(A|B), and P(B|A). Inconsistency occurs when this constellation of estimates does not conform to Bayes' th…
Generic resources, reconstructive processing, and children's mental arithmetic
We report two experiments concerned with a reconstructive processing model of reasoning/remembering dependencies in cognitive development. According to this model, such dependencies occur because problem-solving tasks often permit children to answer short-term memory probes by activating the same information-processing operations that they use to solve problems, not because reasoning and remembering compete for the same supply for scarce resource…
Framing Biases in Plea Bargaining Decisions in Those With and Without Criminal Involvement
About 95% of criminal convictions in the United States are obtained through plea decisions, a growing global practice. Courts justify these convictions based on defendant choice—defendants, as rational agents, can freely choose to plead guilty or go to trial. However, a fundamental axiom of rational choice—descriptive invariance—has never been effectively tested for plea decisions. To test this axiom, we manipulated gain–loss framing of plea opti…
Development of the false-memory illusion
The counterintuitive developmental trend in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) illusion (that false-memory responses increase with age) was investigated in learning-disabled and nondisabled children from the 6- to 14-year-old age range. Fuzzy-trace theory predicts that because there are qualitative differences in how younger versus older children and disabled versus nondisabled children connect meaning information across the words on DRM lists, c…
Fuzzy-trace theory and cognitive triage in memory development
When children and adults retrieve words during unconstrained recall, it is commonly supposed that words will present themselves to consciousness in decreasing order of memory strength, which means that their order of readout should be stronger-- ~ weaker. In contrast, fuzzy-trace theory proposes a counterintuitive nonmonotonic relationship between order of readout and memory strength. This relationship, which we call cognitive triage, arises from…
The gist of juries
Despite the importance of damage awards, juries are often at sea about the amounts that should be awarded, with widely differing awards for cases that seem comparable. We tested a new model of damage award decision making by systematically varying the size, context, and meaningfulness of numerical comparisons or anchors. As a result, we were able to elicit large differences in award amounts that replicated for 2 different cases. Although even arb…
Recollection rejection
A new methodology is presented for studying children's ability to suppress memory reports of false-but-gist-consistent events, one that measures children's use of a specific editing operation (recollection rejection) that suppresses false reports by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Children make memory reports under 2 instructional conditions, verbatim and gist, and the data are analyzed with fuzzy-trace theory's conjoint-recognition mod…
Too young to plead? Risk, rationality, and plea bargaining’s innocence problem in adolescents
Preferences for Temporal Sequences of Real Outcomes Differ Across Domains but do not Vary by Age
After considering potential methodological limitations, theoretical contributions and implications for real-life decisions are discussed
The Gist of Delay of Gratification
Delay of gratification captures elements of temptation and self-denial that characterize real-life problems with money and other problem behaviors such as unhealthy risk taking. According to fuzzy-trace theory, decision makers mentally represent social values such as delay of gratification in a coarse but meaningful form of memory called "gist." Applying this theory, we developed a gist measure of delay of gratification that does not involve quan…
Developmental reversals in false memory
A developmental reversal in false memory is the counterintuitive phenomenon of higher levels of false memory in older children, adolescents, and adults than in younger children. The ability of verbatim memory to suppress this age trend in false memory was evaluated using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Seven and 11-year-old children studied DRM lists either in a standard condition (whole words) that normally produces high levels of f…
Coherence and correspondence criteria for rationality
The aim of this study is to examine both coherence and correspondence criteria for rationality in experts' judgments of risk. We investigated biases in risk estimation for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) predicted by fuzzy-trace theory, i.e., that specific errors would occur despite experts' knowledge of correct responses. One hundred twenty professionals with specific knowledge of STI risks in adolescents were administered a survey questi…
On the development of conscious and unconscious memory
The distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, which is central to modern theories of cognition, has received only limited scrutiny in developmental research. One reason is a need for developmental methodologies that allow age variability in conscious and unconscious memory to be quantified. A simple paradigm (called conjoint recognition) and model are presented that quantify conscious and unconscious memory for learned materials and f…
Socioeconomic status and concussion reporting
Improving health outcomes for concussed athletes and others requires self‐reporting symptoms; not reporting risks second‐impact syndrome and death. However, concussions in adolescents and young adults are often underreported. We treat reporting as a risky decision, extending predictions of fuzzy‐trace theory (FTT). We hypothesize that low SES indirectly interferes with the development of cognitive skills that reduce unhealthy risky decision makin…
How representations of number and numeracy predict decision paradoxes
Higher numeracy has been associated with decision biases in some numerical judgment‐and‐decision problems. According to fuzzy‐trace theory, understanding such paradoxes involves broadening the concept of numeracy to include processing the gist of numbers—their categorical and ordinal relations—in addition to objective (verbatim) knowledge about numbers. We assess multiple representations of gist, as well as numeracy, and use them to better unders…
Age Effects in Sequence-Construction for a Continuous Cognitive Task
We address potential methodological concerns, discuss theoretical implications, and consider potential real-life applications
Logical but incompetent plea decisions
Statistics for Linguists. Frank Anshen
Metaphor and Associated Phenomena
A theoretical survey is presented, introducing a distinction between structural and functional characterizations of metaphor. Although conclusions must be qualified, the present analysis suggests that (a) nominal, predicative, and perhaps sentential metaphors are psychologically distinct for children and adults, (b) different types of metaphor are related to judgments of similarity, although theories differ in their emphasis on this relation, (c)…
Generic resources, reconstructive processing, and children's mental arithmetic
We report two experiments concerned with a reconstructive processing model of reasoning/remembering dependencies in cognitive development. According to this model, such dependencies occur because problem-solving tasks often permit children to answer short-term memory probes by activating the same information-processing operations that they use to solve problems, not because reasoning and remembering compete for the same supply for scarce resource…
Inclusion illusions
Gist is the grist
Can age × learnability interactions explain the development of forgetting
Although recent developmental studies have identified robust age differences in forgetting rates, these differences may be artifacts caused by confounding age with an underlying relationship between forgetting rates and children's learning abilities. This possibility was examined in some experiments that implemented path-analytic causal modeling. None of the path analyses supported the artifactual hypothesis. On the contrary, there were strong ca…
Class inclusion, the conjunction fallacy, and other cognitive illusions
Fuzzy‐trace theory and framing effects in choice
In the first section of this paper, we analyze classic framing effects according to principles of fuzzy‐trace theory. The key principle of the theory is that reasoning prefers to operate on simple gist, as opposed to exact details. Then, we introduce new data in three experiments designed to test this fuzzy‐processing assumption. In the first experiment, framing effects were conserved when numerical information was omitted from standard problems,…
Fuzzy-trace theory and cognitive triage in memory development
When children and adults retrieve words during unconstrained recall, it is commonly supposed that words will present themselves to consciousness in decreasing order of memory strength, which means that their order of readout should be stronger-- ~ weaker. In contrast, fuzzy-trace theory proposes a counterintuitive nonmonotonic relationship between order of readout and memory strength. This relationship, which we call cognitive triage, arises from…
Development of Long-Term Retention
Development of gist versus verbatim memory in sentence recognition
Fuzzy-trace theory is used to explore children's memory and comprehension of sentences describing spatial or linear relationships. Recognition tests were given immediately and after a week's delay, and test sentences'truth, wording (original or novel), and premise-inference status were varied. When children were instructed to recognize only verbatim sentences (Experiment 1), premise recognition (memory) was independent of systematic misrecognitio…
Fuzzy-trace theory
Children's Memory and Metaphorical Interpretation
Assumptions of constructivism, information-processing, and fuzzy-trace theory were tested in two experiments on memory and comprehension of metaphors with 6- and 9-year-old children. In the first experiment, verbatim memory for metaphors was compared with misrecognition of the gist of metaphorical meaning. In the second experiment, children judged metaphorical meaning, including alternative perceptual and psychological interpretations. We found t…
Learning rate, learning opportunities, and the development of forgetting
Reported developmental declines in forgetting rates may be artifacts of correlated individual differences in learning rates or in the number of learning opportunities that children receive. This possibility was investigated in 2 experiments by using causal models that implemented possible relationships among age, forgetting rates, learning rates, and learning opportunities. The artifact hypothesis was disconfirmed. Forgetting rates declined marke…
Mere memory testing creates false memories in children
It has been reported that initial recall tests inoculate true memories against forgetting without creating false memories. This is not true of recognition tests. In 2 experiments with 5- and 8-year-olds, initial recognition tests elevated children's false-memory responses (false alarms to unpresented distractors) on delayed tests. In Experiment I, false-memory creation exceeded true-memory inoculation in 5-year-olds, producing net losses in accur…
On the development of conscious and unconscious memory
The distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, which is central to modern theories of cognition, has received only limited scrutiny in developmental research. One reason is a need for developmental methodologies that allow age variability in conscious and unconscious memory to be quantified. A simple paradigm (called conjoint recognition) and model are presented that quantify conscious and unconscious memory for learned materials and f…
Fuzzy-Trace Theory and False Memory
A key problem confronting theories of false memory is that false-memory phenomena are so diverse: Some are characteristic of controlled laboratory tasks, others of everyday life; some occur for traumatic events with legal consequences, others for innocuous events; some are characteristic of one developmental level, others of another developmental level. Fuzzy-trace theory explains false memories via a small set of principles that implement a sing…
Explaining the development of false memories
Memory Processes Underlying Misinformation Effects in Child Witnesses
Recollection rejection
A new methodology is presented for studying children's ability to suppress memory reports of false-but-gist-consistent events, one that measures children's use of a specific editing operation (recollection rejection) that suppresses false reports by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Children make memory reports under 2 instructional conditions, verbatim and gist, and the data are analyzed with fuzzy-trace theory's conjoint-recognition mod…
How People Make Decisions That Involve Risk
Many health and safety problems, including war and terrorism, are by-products of how people reason about risk. I describe a new approach to reasoning about risk that implements a modern dual-process model of memory called fuzzy-trace theory. This approach posits encoding of both verbatim and gist representations, with reliance on the latter whenever possible; dependence of reasoning on retrieval cues that access stored values and principles; and …
Fuzzy-trace theory and memory development
The Science of False Memory
This book encompasses and weaves together the common threads of the four major topics that comprise the core of false memory research: theories of false memory, adult experimental psychology of false memory, false memory in legal contexts, and false memory in psychotherapy. By integrating material on all four of these topics, the book provides a comprehensive picture of our current understanding of human false memory.
Coherence and correspondence criteria for rationality
The aim of this study is to examine both coherence and correspondence criteria for rationality in experts' judgments of risk. We investigated biases in risk estimation for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) predicted by fuzzy-trace theory, i.e., that specific errors would occur despite experts' knowledge of correct responses. One hundred twenty professionals with specific knowledge of STI risks in adolescents were administered a survey questi…
Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision Making
Crime, smoking, drug use, alcoholism, reckless driving, and many other unhealthy patterns of behavior that play out over a lifetime often debut during adolescence. Avoiding risks or buying time can set a different lifetime pattern. Changing unhealthy behaviors in adolescence would have a broad impact on society, reducing the burdens of disease, injury, human suffering, and associated economic costs. Any program designed to prevent or change such …
Psychology (60 obras) · Cognitive psychology (47 obras) · Cognition (32 obras) · Computer Science (29 obras) · Developmental psychology (27 obras) · Social Psychology (24 obras) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (22 obras) · Memory Processes and Influences (22 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (19 obras) · Cognitive development (13 obras)