Rachel Alison Adcock

Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

DSMM - Duke Scholars in Neurosciences (DSNS)

Campus mail: Box 90999, Durham, NC 27708-0999

Phone: (919) 681-7486

Dr. Adcock received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Emory University and her MD and PhD in Neurobiology from Yale University. She completed her psychiatry residency training at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at UC-San Francisco and did neurosciences research as a postdoctoral fellow at UC-SF, the San Francisco VA Medical Center, and Stanford before joining the Duke faculty in 2007. Her work has been funded by NIDA, NIMH, NSF and Alfred P. Sloan and Klingenstein Fellowships in the Neurosciences, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and honored by NARSAD awards, the 2012 National Academy of Sciences Seymour Benzer Lectureship, and the 2015 ABAI BF Skinner Lectureship. The overall goals of her research program are to understand how brain systems for motivation support learning and to use mechanistic understanding of how behavior changes biology to meet the challenge of developing new therapies appropriate for early interventions for mental illness.

Education and Training

Yale University School of Medicine, M.D. 1999
Yale University, Ph.D. 1999

Selected Grants and Awards

Publications

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

To represent value for learning and decision making, the brain must encode information about both the motivational relevance and affective valence of anticipated outcomes.

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

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common and impairing disorder affecting millions of children, adolescents, and adults.

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

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

Amygdala Reactivity in Singaporeans at Ultra High Risk for the Development of Schizophrenia

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

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.

Cognitive Neurostimulation: Learning to Volitionally Sustain Ventral Tegmental Area Activation

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

Career visual searchers such as radiologists and airport security screeners strive to conduct accurate visual searches, but despite extensive training, errors still occur.

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

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.

Distinct medial temporal lobe network states as neural contexts for motivated memory formation

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

Adaptive motivated behavior requires predictive internal representations of the environment, and surprising events are indications for encoding new representations of the environment.

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Rachel Alison Adcock

Education and Training

Selected Grants and Awards

Publications

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