Abstract
Novelty is central to the study of memory, but the wide range of experimental manipulations aimed to reveal its effects on learning produced inconsistent results. The novelty/encoding hypothesis suggests that novel information undergoes enhanced encoding and thus leads to benefits in memory, especially in recognition performance; however, recent studies cast doubts on this assumption. On the other hand, data from animal studies provided evidence on the robust effects of novelty manipulations on the neurophysiological correlates of memory processes. Conceptualizations and operationalizations of novelty are remarkably variable and were categorized into different subtypes, such as stimulus, context, associative or spatial novelty. Here, we summarize previous findings about the effects of novelty on memory and suggest that predictive coding theories provide a framework that could shed light on the differential influence of novelty manipulations on memory performance. In line with predictive coding theories, we emphasize the role of unexpectedness as a crucial property mediating the behavioral and neural effects of novelty manipulations.
Highlights
Any notion to be explored by the scientific community needs to be defined unambiguously and novelty is not an exception
We propose that the memory-enhancing effects of various novelty manipulations used in cognitive neuroscience mostly depend on the degree of unexpectedness (Figure 2)
We suggest that inconsistencies of the reported memory effects are in part due to the different degree of unexpectedness induced by the manipulations
Summary
Any notion to be explored by the scientific community needs to be defined unambiguously and novelty is not an exception. The interpretation of the data was soon challenged—it was pointed out that hit rates for novel vs familiar stimuli may have differed because the false alarm rate for familiar words was relatively higher, suggesting that the results may have stemmed from an interference effect within the familiar stimulus set (Dobbins et al, 1998) This interference-based explanation of the original findings, failed to completely refute the novelty/encoding hypothesis, as other studies still supported a memory-enhancing effect of novelty. A parallel line of animal studies produced more consistent results These inquiries revealed a clear association between novelty manipulations and electrophysiological and molecular markers of memory processes, such as dopaminergic modulation of long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampus (Lisman and Grace, 2005). The large variability of novelty manipulations urged the field to define their distinct subtypes
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