Valerie F. Reyna

Valerie F. Reyna (born 1955) is an American psychologist and Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and an expert on false memory and risky decision making. In collaboration with her husband Charles Brainerd, Reyna developed fuzzy-trace theory, a dual-process model of mental representations underlying memory, judgement, and decision making. According to fuzzy-trace theory, there are two independent types of memory traces: a verbatim trace that records the exact details and a gist trace that extracts general features. Brainerd and Reyna used fuzzy-trace theory to provide a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of false memory, where individuals recall events or details of events that did not happen; their work on this topic and that of others is summarized in their co-authored volume The Science of False Memory. Reyna and other colleagues have co-edited books on risky decision making and adolescent cognition including The Neuroscience of Risky Decision Making, The Adolescent Brain: Learning, Reasoning, and Decision Making, and Neuroeconomics, Judgment, and Decision Making. Reyna is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and Charter Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and Member of the National Academy of Sciences. She served as president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and on the governing board of the Psychonomic Society. Reyna received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2012 and the Hispanic Professional Action Committee Woman of the Year Award in 2001. Biography 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. 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.