Allie loves singing and acting. She once wore a wood-grain bodysuit to play Pinocchio in Shrek: The Musical.

Allie (Alyssa) Sinclair

Allie joined the Adcock lab in Fall 2018, via the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program. She is co-supervised by Alison Adcock and Gregory Samanez-Larkin. Allie's research focuses on the neural and cognitive conditions that support learning from error. Before coming to Duke, Allie graduated from the University of Toronto, where she earned a B.Sc. as a Research Specialist in Psychology and conducted independent research with Morgan Barense and William Cunningham.
What can we do to help people learn from error? Allie's research explores how and why we update our memories and beliefs in response to feedback. Our flexible brains can recreate and revise our memories, letting us correct mistakes and integrate old and new knowledge. However, these constructive memory processes can also create false memories. Allie's research explores the cognitive and neural conditions that make memory updating possible. Understanding memory updating has many real-world applications, including improving education, correcting misinformation, treating pathological memories, and changing health-related behaviors.
1. Learning about COVID-19 Risks: With CDC support, Allie is working to develop real-world interventions to realign beliefs about COVID-19 risks with reality. Her large-scale online interventions combine episodic simulation/details with a "risk quiz" that elicits prediction errors. Other related studies explore how people seek information about COVID-19 risks, and which messages encourage information seeking for various target groups.

2. Surprise & Novelty in the Hippocampus and Neuromodulatory Systems: In two fMRI studies, Allie is investigating how surprising and novel stimuli engage the hippocampus, midbrain, and basal forebrain. Her research offers new insights into the neural mechanisms that allow episodic memories to be updated or distorted after surprising events.

3. Context of Learning: In several behavioral and fMRI studies, Allie is exploring how recent experiences (failure, surprise, novelty), motivational states (imperative vs. interrogative), and individual differences (perfectionism, anxiety, right-wing authoritarianism) influence encoding and learning from error. These studies examine episodic memory errors, reinforcement learning, and semantic knowledge updating.

Allie (Alyssa) Sinclair

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