The Neuroscience of Risky Decision Making

Valerie F. Reyna, PhD, is director of the Human Neuroscience Institute at Cornell University and former president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, professor and codirector of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research at Cornell University, and codirector of the Cornell University Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility.

She is a developer of fuzzy trace theory, a model of memory, decision making, and development that is widely applied in law, medicine, and public health. Her recent work has focused on numeracy, medical decision making, risk perception and risk taking, neurobiological models of development, and neurocognitive impairment and genetics.

Dr. Reyna 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 a 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 research supports an evidence-based explanation of neural and psychological processes of risk taking in adolescence and adulthood, which predicts real-world behaviors. The author of more than 75 publications that have been cited more than 8, times, Dr. Reyna is a fellow of numerous scientific societies and has served on scientific panels of the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Vivian Zayas, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at Cornell University.

Her research examines the cognitive and affective processes involved in delay of gratification and the interplay between attachment and affiliative processes, on the one hand, and self-control processes, on the other, using theoretical frameworks and methods that cross traditionally defined boundaries between social and personality psychology and cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology.

Her research has appeared in journals such as Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Child Development, Nature Neuroscience, and the Journal of Personality.

She has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.