ISS Faculty Fellow
Judgment, Decision Making, and Social Behavior Team
2009-2012
Valerie Reyna, Professor of Human Development, is a developer of fuzzy-trace theory, a model of the relation between mental representations and decision making that has been widely applied in law, medicine, and public health. She has been a leader in using memory principles such as accessibility and mathematical models of memory to explain judgment and decision making. Among her theoretical proposals, she is particularly well known for a model of intuition that places it at the apex of judgment and decision making, rather than treating it as developmentally primitive process. She also helped to initiate what is now a burgeoning area of research on developmental differences in judgment and decision making. Her recent work in this area has focused on rationality and risky decision making, particularly risk taking in adolescence. She has also extended fuzzy-trace theory to risk perception, numeracy, and dual processes in medical decision making by both physicians and patients. She is President-Elect of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, is a fellow of numerous scientific societies, and serves on advisory panels for the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences.
Reyna, V. F., (2008). A theory of medical decision making and health: Fuzzy-trace theory. Medical Decision Making, 28, 850-865.
Reyna, V. F., & Rivers, S. E. (2008). Current theories of risk and rational decision making. Developmental Review, 28 (1), 1-11.
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.
See Valerie Reyna's publications.
Visit Valerie Reyna's home page.
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