ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews traditional assumptions about relations between memory and higher cognition, recent research that challenges these assumptions, and implications of this research for theories of reasoning, judgment, and decision-making. The analysis supports an intuitionist approach to judgment and decision-making. In contrast to either heuristics-and-biases or adaptive-ecological approaches, the fuzzy trace theory (FTT) accounts for inconsistencies in human reasoning by assuming dual (gist-based versus verbatim-based) processes. These assumptions explain how reasoners exhibit different degrees of rationality across contexts. Examples from framing, availability, hindsight bias, syllogistic reasoning, base-rate neglect, adolescent risk-taking, and conjunctive/disjunctive probability judgment are discussed. Key explanatory principles are (1) that multiple gist and verbatim representations provide cognitive flexibility, but (2) reasoning gravitates to the least precise level of gist that the task allows, increasingly so as expertise develops. Thus, despite underlying conceptual similarities across tasks, rationality is contextually and developmentally dependent.
