Rachel Alison Adcock

Journal article Annu Rev Psychol · January 2026 Our memories shape our perception of the world and guide adaptive behavior. Rather than being a veridical record of experiences, memory is selective. An accumulating body of work suggests that motivational states, emerging from the interplay between intern ... Full text Link to item Cite

Learning emotion regulation: An integrative framework.

Journal article Psychol Rev · January 2025 Improving emotion regulation abilities, a process that requires learning, can enhance psychological well-being and mental health. Empirical evidence suggests that emotion regulation can be learned-during development and the lifespan, and most explicitly in ... Full text Link to item Cite

First impressions or good endings? Preferences depend on when you ask.

Journal article J Exp Psychol Gen · October 2024 Rewards often unfold over time; we must summarize events in memory to guide future choices. Do first impressions matter most, or is it better to end on a good note? Across nine studies (N = 569), we tested these competing intuitions and found that preferen ... Full text Link to item Cite

Memory and belief updating following complete and partial reminders of fake news.

Journal article Cogn Res Princ Implic · May 7, 2024 Fake news can have enduring effects on memory and beliefs. An ongoing theoretical debate has investigated whether corrections (fact-checks) should include reminders of fake news. The familiarity backfire account proposes that reminders hinder correction (i ... Full text Link to item Cite

Toward an integrative account of internal and external determinants of event segmentation.

Journal article Psychon Bull Rev · April 2024 Our daily experiences unfold continuously, but we remember them as a series of discrete events through a process called event segmentation. Prominent theories of event segmentation suggest that event boundaries in memory are triggered by significant shifts ... Full text Link to item Cite

Correction for Sinclair et al., Instructed motivational states bias reinforcement learning and memory formation

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · March 19, 2024 Full text Cite

Curiosity evolves as information unfolds.

Journal article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · October 24, 2023 When people feel curious, they often seek information to resolve their curiosity. Reaching resolution, however, does not always occur in a single step but instead may follow the accumulation of information over time. Here, we investigated changes in curios ... Full text Link to item Cite

Instructed motivational states bias reinforcement learning and memory formation.

Journal article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · August 2023 Motivation influences goals, decisions, and memory formation. Imperative motivation links urgent goals to actions, narrowing the focus of attention and memory. Conversely, interrogative motivation integrates goals over time and space, supporting rich memor ... Full text Link to item Cite

Communicating COVID-19 exposure risk with an interactive website counteracts risk misestimation.

Journal article PLoS One · 2023 During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals depended on risk information to make decisions about everyday behaviors and public policy. Here, we assessed whether an interactive website influenced individuals' risk tolerance to support public health goals. We ... Full text Link to item Cite

Hippocampal convergence during anticipatory midbrain activation promotes subsequent memory formation.

Journal article Nat Commun · November 7, 2022 The hippocampus has been a focus of memory research since H.M's surgery abolished his ability to form new memories, yet its mechanistic role in memory remains debated. Here, we identify a candidate memory mechanism: an anticipatory hippocampal "convergence ... Full text Link to item Cite

Remembering Election Night 2016: Subjective but not objective metrics of autobiographical memory vary with political affiliation, affective valence, and surprise.

Journal article J Exp Psychol Gen · February 2022 Flashbulb memories represent a unique phenomenon linking research on cognition with research on emotion, yet most studies on this phenomenon have characterized collective events that are negative and unexpected in nature. In contrast, the 2016 American ele ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prediction errors disrupt hippocampal representations and update episodic memories.

Journal article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · December 21, 2021 The brain supports adaptive behavior by generating predictions, learning from errors, and updating memories to incorporate new information. Prediction error, or surprise, triggers learning when reality contradicts expectations. Prior studies have shown tha ... Full text Link to item Cite

Predictors of real-time fMRI neurofeedback performance and improvement - A machine learning mega-analysis.

Journal article Neuroimage · August 15, 2021 Real-time fMRI neurofeedback is an increasingly popular neuroimaging technique that allows an individual to gain control over his/her own brain signals, which can lead to improvements in behavior in healthy participants as well as to improvements of clinic ... Full text Link to item Cite

Pairing facts with imagined consequences improves pandemic-related risk perception.

Journal article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · August 10, 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic reached staggering new peaks during a global resurgence more than a year after the crisis began. Although public health guidelines initially helped to slow the spread of disease, widespread pandemic fatigue and prolonged harm to finan ... Full text Link to item Cite

Imagining a Personalized Scenario Selectively Increases Perceived Risk of Viral Transmission for Older Adults.

Journal article Nat Aging · August 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public-health emergency. Older adults have been at substantially greater risk of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death due to COVID-19; as of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths i ... Full text Link to item Cite

Can we predict real-time fMRI neurofeedback learning success from pretraining brain activity?

Journal article Hum Brain Mapp · October 1, 2020 Neurofeedback training has been shown to influence behavior in healthy participants as well as to alleviate clinical symptoms in neurological, psychosomatic, and psychiatric patient populations. However, many real-time fMRI neurofeedback studies report lar ... Full text Link to item Cite

Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams.

Journal article Nature · June 2020 Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same datas ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prediction Errors Disrupt Hippocampal Representations and Update Episodic Memories

Journal article · 2020 The brain supports adaptive behavior by generating predictions, learning from errors, and updating memories to incorporate new information. Prediction error, or surprise, triggers learning when reality contradicts expectations. Prior studies have shown th ... Full text Cite

Pyneal: Open Source Real-Time fMRI Software.

Journal article Front Neurosci · 2020 Increasingly, neuroimaging researchers are exploring the use of real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rt-fMRI) as a way to access a participant's ongoing brain function throughout a scan. This approach presents novel and exciting experimental ap ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Correction: Progressive decline in hippocampal CA1 volume in individuals at ultra-high-risk for psychosis who do not remit: findings from the longitudinal youth at risk study.

Journal article Neuropsychopharmacology · November 2019 An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper. ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Expected Reward Value and Reward Uncertainty Have Temporally Dissociable Effects on Memory Formation.

Journal article J Cogn Neurosci · October 2019 Anticipating rewards has been shown to enhance memory formation. Although substantial evidence implicates dopamine in this behavioral effect, the precise mechanisms remain ambiguous. Because dopamine nuclei have been associated with two distinct physiologi ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Enhancing activation in the right temporoparietal junction using theta-burst stimulation: Disambiguating between two hypotheses of top-down control of behavioral mimicry.

Journal article PLoS One · 2019 Whereas previous research has focused on the role of the rTPJ when consciously inhibiting mimicry, we test the role of the rTPJ on mimicry within a social interaction, during which mimicking occurs nonconsciously. We wanted to determine whether higher rTPJ ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Large-Scale Network Topology Reveals Heterogeneity in Individuals With at Risk Mental State for Psychosis: Findings From the Longitudinal Youth-at-Risk Study.

Journal article Cereb Cortex · December 1, 2018 Emerging evidence demonstrates heterogeneity in clinical outcomes of prodromal psychosis that only a small percentage of at-risk individuals eventually progress to full-blown psychosis. To examine the neurobiological underpinnings of this heterogeneity fro ... Full text Link to item Cite

Motivational valence alters memory formation without altering exploration of a real-life spatial environment.

Journal article PLoS One · 2018 Volitional exploration and learning are key to adaptive behavior, yet their characterization remains a complex problem for cognitive science. Exploration has been posited as a mechanism by which motivation promotes memory, but this relationship is not well ... Full text Link to item Cite

Single session real-time fMRI neurofeedback has a lasting impact on cognitive behavioral therapy strategies.

Journal article Neuroimage Clin · 2018 To benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), individuals must not only learn new skills but also strategically implement them outside of session. Here, we tested a novel technique for personalizing CBT skills and facilitating their generalization to ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Motivation and Memory

Journal article Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience · 2018 In this chapter we explore how motivation affects what we learn and subsequently remember. Our memories are not a perfect record of every event in our lives, meticulously recorded and replayed precisely whenever we desire. They are quite the opposite: Memo ... Full text Cite

Relating Sensory, Cognitive, and Neural Factors to Older Persons' Perceptions about Happiness: An Exploratory Study.

Journal article J Aging Res · 2018 Despite increased rates of disease, disability, and social losses with aging, seniors consistently report higher levels of subjective well-being (SWB), a construct closely related to happiness, than younger adults. In this exploratory study, we utilized an ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Individual differences in regulatory focus predict neural response to reward.

Journal article Soc Neurosci · August 2017 Although goal pursuit is related to both functioning of the brain's reward circuits and psychological factors, the literatures surrounding these concepts have often been separate. Here, we use the psychological construct of regulatory focus to investigate ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Progressive Decline in Hippocampal CA1 Volume in Individuals at Ultra-High-Risk for Psychosis Who Do Not Remit: Findings from the Longitudinal Youth at Risk Study.

Journal article Neuropsychopharmacology · May 2017 Most individuals identified as ultra-high-risk (UHR) for psychosis do not develop frank psychosis. They continue to exhibit subthreshold symptoms, or go on to fully remit. Prior work has shown that the volume of CA1, a subfield of the hippocampus, is selec ... Full text Link to item Cite

Hippocampus and Prefrontal Cortex Predict Distinct Timescales of Activation in the Human Ventral Tegmental Area.

Journal article Cereb Cortex · February 1, 2017 The mesolimbic dopamine system contributes to a remarkable variety of behaviors at multiple timescales. Midbrain neurons have fast and slow signaling components, and specific afferent systems, such as the hippocampus (HPC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC), have ... Full text Link to item Cite

Selectivity in Postencoding Connectivity with High-Level Visual Cortex Is Associated with Reward-Motivated Memory.

Journal article J Neurosci · January 18, 2017 UNLABELLED: Reward motivation has been demonstrated to enhance declarative memory by facilitating systems-level consolidation. Although high-reward information is often intermixed with lower reward information during an experience, memory for high value in ... Full text Link to item Cite

Selectivity in post-encoding connectivity with high-level visual cortex is associated with reward-motivated memory.

Journal article J Neurosci · December 5, 2016 Reward motivation has been demonstrated to enhance declarative memory by facilitating systems level consolidation. While high reward information is often intermixed with lower reward information during an experience, memory for those experiences prioritize ... Full text Link to item Cite

Distinct medial temporal networks encode surprise during motivation by reward versus punishment.

Journal article Neurobiol Learn Mem · October 2016 Adaptive motivated behavior requires predictive internal representations of the environment, and surprising events are indications for encoding new representations of the environment. The medial temporal lobe memory system, including the hippocampus and su ... Full text Link to item Cite

Disrupted salience network functional connectivity and white-matter microstructure in persons at risk for psychosis: findings from the LYRIKS study.

Journal article Psychol Med · October 2016 BACKGROUND: Salience network (SN) dysconnectivity has been hypothesized to contribute to schizophrenia. Nevertheless, little is known about the functional and structural dysconnectivity of SN in subjects at risk for psychosis. We hypothesized that SN funct ... Full text Link to item Cite

Cognitive Neurostimulation: Learning to Volitionally Sustain Ventral Tegmental Area Activation.

Journal article Neuron · March 16, 2016 Activation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and mesolimbic networks is essential to motivation, performance, and learning. Humans routinely attempt to motivate themselves, with unclear efficacy or impact on VTA networks. Using fMRI, we found untrained p ... Full text Link to item Cite

Hippocampal and Insular Response to Smoking-Related Environments: Neuroimaging Evidence for Drug-Context Effects in Nicotine Dependence.

Journal article Neuropsychopharmacology · February 2016 Environments associated with prior drug use provoke craving and drug taking, and set the stage for lapse/relapse. Although the neurobehavioral bases of environment-induced drug taking have been investigated with animal models, the influence of drug-environ ... Full text Link to item Cite

Reward Anticipation Dynamics during Cognitive Control and Episodic Encoding: Implications for Dopamine.

Journal article Front Hum Neurosci · 2016 Dopamine (DA) modulatory activity critically supports motivated behavior. This modulation operates at multiple timescales, but the functional roles of these distinct dynamics on cognition are still being characterized. Reward processing has been robustly l ... Full text Link to item Cite

Lack of Evidence for Regional Brain Volume or Cortical Thickness Abnormalities in Youths at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis: Findings From the Longitudinal Youth at Risk Study.

Journal article Schizophr Bull · November 2015 There is cumulative evidence that young people in an "at-risk mental state" (ARMS) for psychosis show structural brain abnormalities in frontolimbic areas, comparable to, but less extensive than those reported in established schizophrenia. However, most av ... Full text Link to item Cite

Resting state networks distinguish human ventral tegmental area from substantia nigra.

Journal article Neuroimage · October 15, 2014 Dopaminergic networks modulate neural processing across a spectrum of function from perception to learning to action. Multiple organizational schemes based on anatomy and function have been proposed for dopaminergic nuclei in the midbrain. One schema origi ... Full text Link to item Cite

Enriched encoding: reward motivation organizes cortical networks for hippocampal detection of unexpected events.

Journal article Cereb Cortex · August 2014 Learning how to obtain rewards requires learning about their contexts and likely causes. How do long-term memory mechanisms balance the need to represent potential determinants of reward outcomes with the computational burden of an over-inclusive memory? O ... Full text Link to item Cite

ADHD, altered dopamine neurotransmission, and disrupted reinforcement processes: implications for smoking and nicotine dependence.

Journal article Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry · July 3, 2014 Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common and impairing disorder affecting millions of children, adolescents, and adults. Individuals with ADHD smoke cigarettes at rates significantly higher than their non-diagnosed peers and the disorder ... Full text Link to item Cite

Altered striatal functional connectivity in subjects with an at-risk mental state for psychosis.

Journal article Schizophr Bull · July 2014 Recent functional imaging work in individuals experiencing an at-risk mental state (ARMS) for psychosis has implicated dorsal striatal abnormalities in the emergence of psychotic symptoms, contrasting with earlier findings implicating the ventral striatum. ... Full text Link to item Cite

Mechanisms of motivation-cognition interaction: challenges and opportunities.

Journal article Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci · June 2014 Recent years have seen a rejuvenation of interest in studies of motivation-cognition interactions arising from many different areas of psychology and neuroscience. The present issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience provides a sampling of ... Full text Link to item Cite

Context matters: the structure of task goals affects accuracy in multiple-target visual search.

Journal article Appl Ergon · May 2014 Career visual searchers such as radiologists and airport security screeners strive to conduct accurate visual searches, but despite extensive training, errors still occur. A key difference between searches in radiology and airport security is the structure ... Full text Link to item Cite

Preserved working memory and altered brain activation in persons at risk for psychosis.

Journal article Am J Psychiatry · November 2013 OBJECTIVE: Patients with schizophrenia exhibit impairments in working memory that often appear in attenuated form in persons at high risk for the illness. The authors hypothesized that deviations in task-related brain activation and deactivation would occu ... Full text Link to item Cite

Size matters: how age and reaching experiences shape infants' preferences for different sized objects.

Journal article Infant Behav Dev · April 2013 Looking and reaching preferences for different-sized objects were examined in 4-5- and 5-6-month-old infants. Infants were presented with pairs of different sized cylinders and preferences were analyzed by age and reaching status. Outcome variables include ... Full text Link to item Cite

Hippocampal networks habituate as novelty accumulates.

Journal article Learn Mem · March 19, 2013 Novelty detection, a critical computation within the medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system, necessarily depends on prior experience. The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans to investigate dynamic changes in MTL acti ... Full text Link to item Cite

Threat of punishment motivates memory encoding via amygdala, not midbrain, interactions with the medial temporal lobe.

Journal article J Neurosci · June 27, 2012 Neural circuits associated with motivated declarative encoding and active threat avoidance have both been described, but the relative contribution of these systems to punishment-motivated encoding remains unknown. The current study used functional magnetic ... Full text Link to item Cite

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex drives mesolimbic dopaminergic regions to initiate motivated behavior.

Journal article J Neurosci · July 13, 2011 How does the brain translate information signaling potential rewards into motivation to get them? Motivation to obtain reward is thought to depend on the midbrain [particularly the ventral tegmental area (VTA)], the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), and the dorsol ... Full text Link to item Cite

Electrophysiological and diffusion tensor imaging evidence of delayed corollary discharges in patients with schizophrenia.

Journal article Psychol Med · May 2011 BACKGROUND: Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) characteristically exhibit supranormal levels of cortical activity to self-induced sensory stimuli, ostensibly because of abnormalities in the neural signals (corollary discharges, CDs) normatively involved in s ... Full text Link to item Cite

Reprint of: fMRI studies of successful emotional memory encoding: a quantitative meta-analysis.

Journal article Neuropsychologia · March 2011 Over the past decade, fMRI techniques have been increasingly used to interrogate the neural correlates of successful emotional memory encoding. These investigations have typically aimed to either characterize the contributions of the amygdala and medial te ... Full text Link to item Cite

Is all motivation good for learning? Dissociable influences of approach and avoidance motivation in declarative memory.

Journal article Learn Mem · 2011 The present study investigated the effects of approach versus avoidance motivation on declarative learning. Human participants navigated a virtual reality version of the Morris water task, a classic spatial memory paradigm, adapted to permit the experiment ... Full text Link to item Cite

fMRI studies of successful emotional memory encoding: A quantitative meta-analysis.

Journal article Neuropsychologia · October 2010 Over the past decade, fMRI techniques have been increasingly used to interrogate the neural correlates of successful emotional memory encoding. These investigations have typically aimed to either characterize the contributions of the amygdala and medial te ... Full text Link to item Cite

Dopamine and adaptive memory.

Journal article Trends Cogn Sci · October 2010 Memory is essential to adaptive behavior because it allows past experience to guide choices. Emerging findings indicate that the neurotransmitter dopamine, which signals motivationally important events, also modulates the hippocampus, a crucial brain syste ... Full text Link to item Cite

Functional significance of striatal responses during episodic decisions: recovery or goal attainment?

Journal article J Neurosci · March 31, 2010 Memory retrieval is typically a goal-directed behavior, and as such, potentially influenced by reinforcement and motivation processes. Although striatal activation is often evident during memory retrieval, its functional significance remains unclear becaus ... Full text Link to item Cite

Timing is everything: neural response dynamics during syllable processing and its relation to higher-order cognition in schizophrenia and healthy comparison subjects.

Journal article Int J Psychophysiol · February 2010 Successful linguistic processing requires efficient encoding of successively-occurring auditory input in a time-constrained manner, especially under noisy conditions. In this study we examined the early neural response dynamics to rapidly-presented success ... Full text Link to item Cite

When top-down meets bottom-up: auditory training enhances verbal memory in schizophrenia.

Journal article Schizophr Bull · November 2009 A critical research priority for our field is to develop treatments that enhance cognitive functioning in schizophrenia and thereby attenuate the functional losses associated with the illness. In this article, we describe such a treatment method that is gr ... Full text Link to item Cite

Activation in the VTA and nucleus accumbens increases in anticipation of both gains and losses.

Journal article Front Behav Neurosci · 2009 To represent value for learning and decision making, the brain must encode information about both the motivational relevance and affective valence of anticipated outcomes. The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and ventral tegmental area (VTA) are thought to play ke ... Full text Link to item Cite

Reward-motivated learning: mesolimbic activation precedes memory formation.

Journal article Neuron · May 4, 2006 We examined anticipatory mechanisms of reward-motivated memory formation using event-related FMRI. In a monetary incentive encoding task, cues signaled high- or low-value reward for memorizing an upcoming scene. When tested 24 hr postscan, subjects were si ... Full text Link to item Cite

Remembrance of rewards past.

Journal article Neuron · February 3, 2005 Using event-related fMRI, Wittmann and colleagues report in this issue of Neuron that reward value enhances cue memory and that this process is associated with midbrain modulation of hippocampal consolidation. We propose that their findings introduce a nov ... Full text Link to item Cite

Functional neuroanatomy of executive processes involved in dual-task performance.

Journal article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · March 28, 2000 The subjective experience of allocating one's attentional resources among competing tasks is nearly universal, and most current models of cognition include a mechanism that performs this allocation; examples include the central executive system and the sup ... Full text Link to item Cite

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia and cardiovascular responses to stress.

Journal article Psychophysiology · July 1992 The parasympathetic nervous system provides mechanisms that could attenuate sympathetically mediated heart rate stress responses and might have even more general antagonistic actions on stress reactivity. Individuals characterized by higher levels of paras ... Full text Link to item Cite

Caffeine effects on cardiovascular and neuroendocrine responses to acute psychosocial stress and their relationship to level of habitual caffeine consumption.

Journal article Psychosom Med · 1990 The effects of a moderate dose of caffeine on cardiovascular and neuroendocrine stress reactivity were examined in 25 healthy male subjects selected as habitual or light consumers of caffeine. Measurements were taken under resting conditions before and aft ... Full text Link to item Cite