Valerie Reyna

Valerie Reyna is professor of human development and psychology at Cornell University and a co-director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research and of the Cornell University Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility.  She is also past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.

Dr. Reyna's research encompasses human judgment and decision making, numeracy and quantitative reasoning, risk and uncertainty, medical decision-making, social judgment, and false memory.  She is a developer of fuzzy-trace theory, a model widely applied in law, medicine, and public health. 

Her recent work has focused on aging, neurocognitive impairment, and genetic risk factors; rationality and risky decision-making, particularly risk taking in adolescence; and neuroimaging models of framing and decision-making.  She also has extended fuzzy-trace theory to risk perception, numeracy, and dual processes in medical decision-making by both physicians and patients. 

In addition, Dr. Reyna teaches an undergraduate and a graduate seminar on risk and rational decision-making.