ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2018
Brain activation covaries with reported criminal behaviors when making risky choices: A fuzzy-trace theory approach.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- How Time Pressure Amplifies Framing Effects in Risky Decision-Making: The Role of Attentional Allocation and Information Presentation.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- An Investigation on Integral Emotions as Parallel Predictors for Risky Financial Behavior.PsyCh journal · 2026Article
- Neural reward processing among children with conduct disorder and mild traumatic brain injury in the ABCD study.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Critical tests of fuzzy trace theory in brain and behavior: uncertainty across time, probability, and development.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Supporting Health and Medical Decision Making: Findings and Insights from Fuzzy-Trace Theory.Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making · 2022Article
- How Fuzzy-trace Theory Predicts Development of Risky Decision Making, with Novel Extensions to Culture and Reward Sensitivity.Developmental review : DR · 2021Article
- Explaining risky choices with judgments: Framing, the zero effect, and the contextual relativity of gist.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2021Article
- A scientific theory of gist communication and misinformation resistance, with implications for health, education, and policy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Review
- When Irrational Biases Are Smart: A Fuzzy-Trace Theory of Complex Decision Making.Journal of Intelligence · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Criminal behavior has been associated with abnormal neural activity when people experience risks and rewards or exercise inhibition. However, neural substrates of mental representations that underlie criminal and noncriminal risk-taking in adulthood have received scant attention. We take a new approach, applying fuzzy-trace theory, to examine neural substrates of risk preferences and criminality. We extend ideas about gist (simple meaning) and verbatim (precise risk-reward tradeoffs) representations used to explain adolescent risk-taking to uncover neural correlates of developmentally inappropriate adult risk-taking. We tested predictions using a risky-choice framing task completed in the MRI scanner, and examined neural covariation with self-reported criminal and noncriminal risk-taking. As predicted, risk-taking was correlated with a behavioral pattern of risk preferences called "reverse framing" (preferring sure losses over a risky option and a risky option over sure gains, the opposite of typical framing biases) that has been linked to risky behavior in adolescents and is rarely observed in nondisordered adults. Experimental manipulations confirmed processing interpretations of typical framing (gist-based) and reverse-framing (verbatim-based) risk preferences. In the brain, covariation with criminal and noncriminal risk-taking was observed predominantly when subjects made reverse-framing choices. Noncriminal risk-taking behavior was associated with emotional reactivity (amygdala) and reward motivation (striatal) areas, whereas criminal behavior was associated with greater activation in temporal and parietal cortices, their junction, and insula. When subjects made more developmentally typical framing choices, reflecting nonpreferred gist processing, activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex covaried with criminal risk-taking, which may reflect cognitive effort to process gist while inhibiting preferred verbatim processing. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.