María Dolores Valiña García

María Dolores Valiña García is a long-standing researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela, affiliated with the Faculty of Psychology and the Department of Social, Basic and Methodological Psychology. Her career spanned from 1986 to 2022, focusing on Cognitive Psychology and Reasoning theories. She co-founded the research group COSOYPA (Social Behavior and Applied Psychometry), contributing to pragmatic reasoning models.

• Education: Doctorate from the University of La Laguna (1985), thesis on everyday reasoning with probabilistic quantifiers, supervised by Dr. Manuel de Vega Rodríguez.

Her research interests include Deductive Reasoning, Heuristics and Biases, Dual Process Theory, and Mental Models. She conducted extensive empirical studies on Wason's Selection Task and the THOG Problem, analyzing how thematic content, scenario framing, and deontic rules influence reasoning. Collaborators include Montserrat Martín and Dr. Manuel de Vega.

Key findings reveal the dynamic and flexible nature of human reasoning, rejecting purely syntactic models in favor of semantic-pragmatic frameworks. Her work highlights the interplay between cognitive flexibility and reasoning performance, integrating psychometric traditions with information-processing approaches.