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Category: Project

Description: One goal of cognitive science is to build theories of mental function that predict individual behavior. In this project we focus on predicting, for individual participants, which specific items in a list will be remembered at some point in the future. If you want to know if an individual will remember something, one commonsense approach is to give them a quiz or test such that a correct answer likely indicates later memory for an item. In this project we attempt to predict later memory without explicit assessments by jointly modeling both neural and behavioral data in a computational cognitive model which captures the dynamics of memory acquisition and decay. In this paper, we lay out a novel hierarchical Bayesian approach for combining neural and behavioral data and present results showing how fMRI signals recorded during the study phase of a memory task can improve our ability to predict (in held-out data) which items will be remembered or forgotten 72 hours later.