Valerie Reyna

Valerie Reyna

Valerie F. Reyna is the researcher whose denominator neglect model is credited, in a 2007 commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, with anticipating the base-rate respect model of Aron Barbey and Steven Sloman. With Charles Brainerd she is the co-author of a 2008 paper in Learning and Individual Differences on numeracy, ratio bias and denominator neglect in judgments of risk and probability.

Who they are

Reyna appears in this site's material through the 2007 commentary by Brainerd and the 2008 paper she wrote with him. Her institution and wider body of work have not been verified for this site, so this page does not describe them.

Key papers

Reyna, V. F., & Brainerd, C. J. (2008). Numeracy, ratio bias, and denominator neglect in judgments of risk and probability. Learning and Individual Differences, 18(1), 89-107. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2007.03.011

The title joins three terms, numeracy, ratio bias and denominator neglect, as one topic in the study of risk and probability judgments. No finding from the paper is attributed to it on this site.

Key ideas

Brainerd's 2007 commentary names three parallels between Reyna's denominator neglect model and the base-rate respect model: both rest on a general cognitive theory, both treat problem structure as a source of reasoning error, and both see nested set relations as the cause of base-rate neglect. Christopher Wolfe's commentary in the same issue sets out the related prediction that overlapping class-inclusion relations create processing interference, leading people to act as if they ignore marginal denominators. The concept is described on the page on denominator neglect.

Sources

  1. Reyna, V. F., & Brainerd, C. J. (2008). Numeracy, ratio bias, and denominator neglect in judgments of risk and probability. Learning and Individual Differences, 18(1), 89-107. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2007.03.011
  2. Brainerd, C. J. (2007). Kissing cousins but not identical twins: The denominator neglect and base-rate respect models. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(3), 257-258. doi:10.1017/S0140525X07001689
  3. Wolfe, C. R. (2007). Adaptive redundancy, denominator neglect, and the base-rate fallacy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(3), 286-287. doi:10.1017/S0140525X07001951