[2][11] FTT was initially proposed in the 1990s as an attempt to unify findings from the memory and reasoning domains that could not be predicted or explained by earlier approaches to cognition and its development (e.g., constructivism[12][13] and information processing).
More specifically, FTT posits that people form two types of mental representations about a past event, called verbatim and gist traces.
This implies, for example, that even if people are capable of understanding ratio concepts like probabilities and prevalence rates, which are the standard for the presentation of health- and risk-related data, their choice in decision situations will usually be governed by the bottom-line meaning of it (e.g., "the risk is high" or "the risk is low"; "the outcome is bad" or "the outcome is good") rather than the actual numbers.
On the one hand, according to the principle of parallel storage of verbatim and gist traces, verbatim features of the target item (e.g., the word was apple, it was presented in red, printed in boldface and italic, and all but the first letter were presented in lowercase) and gist features (e.g., the word was a type of fruit) would be encoded and stored simultaneously via distinct pathways.
[24][25][26] However, despite the intuitive appeal of the serial processing approach, research suggests that the encoding and storage of gist traces do not depend on verbatim ones.
Consequently, this principle allows verbatim and gist processes to be differentially influenced by factors such as the type of retrieval cues and the availability of each form of representation.
Suppose, for example, that subjects of an experiment are presented with a word list containing several dog breeds, such as poodle, bulldog, greyhound, doberman, beagle, collie, boxer, mastiff, husky, and terrier.
In this example, test probes such as poodle (targets, or studied items) will be better retrieval cues for verbatim traces than gist, whereas test probes such as spaniel (related distractors, non-studied items but related to targets) will be better retrieval cues for gist traces than verbatim.
Brainerd, Reyna, and Kneer,[38] for instance, found that delay drives true recognition rates (supported by both verbatim and gist traces) and false recognition rates (supported by gist and suppressed by verbatim traces) in opposite directions, namely true memory decays over time while false memory increases.
In addition, retrieval of an exclusory verbatim trace ("I saw only the words lemon, apple, pear, and citrus") suppresses acceptance of false but related items such as orange through an operation known as recollection rejection.
[43] Strong identified two distinct types of introspective phenomena associated with memory retrieval that have since been termed recollection (or remembrance) and familiarity.
For example, semantic clustering in free recall increases from 8-year-olds to 14-year-olds,[50] and meaning connection across words and sentences has been shown to improve between 6- and 9-year-olds.
[61] There are 5 explanatory principles that explain FTT's description of false memory, which lays out the differences between experiences dealing with gist and verbatim traces.
In this regard, the theory expands on research that has illustrated the role of memory representations in reasoning processes,[66] the intersection of which has been previously underexplored.
[68] FTT thus explains inconsistencies or biases in reasoning to be dependent on retrieval cues that access stored values and principles that are gist representations, which can be filtered through experience and cultural, affective, and developmental factors.
[73] The dual-process assumption of FTT has also been used to explain common biases of probability judgment, including the conjunction and disjunction fallacies.
[74] FTT explains this phenomenon to not be a matter of encoding, given that priming participants to understand the inclusive nature of the categories tends not to reduce the bias.
For example, since the theory posits that people rely primarily on gist representations in making decisions, and that culture and experience can affect consumers' gist representations, factors such as cultural similarity and personal relevance have been used to explain consumers' perceptions of the risk of food-borne contamination and their intentions to reduce consumption of certain foods.
In other words, one's evaluation of how "at-risk" he or she is can be influenced both by specific information learned as well as by the fuzzy representations of culture experience, and perceived proximity.
In practice this resulted in greater consumer concern when the threat of a food-borne-illness was described in a culturally similar location, regardless of geographical proximity or other verbatim details.
[77] Evidence was also found in consumer research in support of FTT's "editing" hypothesis, namely that extremely low-probability risks can be simplified by gist processing to be represented as "essentially nil."
This result is in contrast to most prescriptive decision rules that predict that formally equivalent methods of communicating risk information should have identical effects on risk-taking behavior, even if the pertinent displays are different.
These findings are predicted by FTT (and related models), which suggest that people reason on the basis of simplified representations rather than on the literal information available.
[78] Like other people, clinicians apply cognitive heuristics and fall into systematic errors which affect decisions in everyday life.
Research has shown that patients and their physicians have difficulty understanding a host of numerical concepts, especially risks and probabilities, and this often implies some problems with numeracy, or mathematical proficiency.
[79] For example, physicians and patients both demonstrate great difficulty understanding the probabilities of certain genetic risks and were prone to the same errors, despite vast differences in medical knowledge.
[81] FTT predicts that simply educating people with statistics regarding risk factors can hinder prevention efforts.
[84] The conclusion drawn from this evidence is that health-care professionals and health policymakers need to package, present, and explain information in more meaningful ways that facilitate forming an appropriate gist.
Such strategies would include explaining quantities qualitatively, displaying information visually, and tailoring the format to trigger the appropriate gist and to cue the retrieval of health-related knowledge and values.
[5] Web-based interventions have been designed using these principles, which have been found to increase the patient's willingness to escalate care, as well as gain knowledge and make an informed choice.