A report on Valerie F. Reyna, Fuzzy-trace theory and Developmental psychology

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.

Fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) is a theory of cognition originally proposed by Valerie F. Reyna and Charles Brainerd that draws upon dual-trace conceptions to predict and explain cognitive phenomena, particularly in memory and reasoning.

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.

The theory has been used in areas such as cognitive psychology, human development, and social psychology to explain, for instance, false memory and its development, probability judgments, medical decision making, risk perception and estimation, and biases and fallacies in decision making.

According to fuzzy-trace theory, a theory of cognition originally proposed by Valerie F. Reyna and Charles Brainerd, people have two separate memory processes: verbatim and gist.