README.md~

# Functional Connectivity Correlates of Rates of Forgetting

This repository contains the data, analysis, and results of the
"Beluga" project, carried out by Yinan Xu, Chantel Prat, and Andrea Stocco at
the University of Washington and [Florian Sense](https://fsense.github.io/) and [Hedderik van Rijn](http://www.van-rijn.org/) at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

## Rationale

In a series of papers, Sense and van Rijn demonstrated that the rate
of forgetting in long-term memory is stable across time and materials
within an individual---it is, thus, akin to what personality
psychologists would call a _trait_, and to what computational
neuroscientists and statisticians would call an _idiographic
parameter_.

It is likely that such idiographic characteristics reflect the
underlying biology of an individual. If this is true, then the
parameter should be reflected in some measures of recordable
electropshyiological activity, such as fMRI, EEG, or PET recordings.

## Resting State Neuroimaging

For this project, we focused on _resting state_ fMRI, using data collected by Chantel Prat from 64 participants. A subset of these participants were also asked to perform van Rijn's adaptive learning task; their estimated rate of forgetting is then correlated with functional connectivity values between the 264 regions in the Power et al (2011) parcellation.

The results are the following