School of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, MA, USA.
Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Rome, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2013 Dec 11;4:907. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00907. eCollection 2013.
Novelty and surprise play significant roles in animal behavior and in attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying it. They also play important roles in technology, where detecting observations that are novel or surprising is central to many applications, such as medical diagnosis, text processing, surveillance, and security. Theories of motivation, particularly of intrinsic motivation, place novelty and surprise among the primary factors that arouse interest, motivate exploratory or avoidance behavior, and drive learning. In many of these studies, novelty and surprise are not distinguished from one another: the words are used more-or-less interchangeably. However, while undeniably closely related, novelty and surprise are very different. The purpose of this article is first to highlight the differences between novelty and surprise and to discuss how they are related by presenting an extensive review of mathematical and computational proposals related to them, and then to explore the implications of this for understanding behavioral and neuroscience data. We argue that opportunities for improved understanding of behavior and its neural basis are likely being missed by failing to distinguish between novelty and surprise.
新奇和惊喜在动物行为及其神经机制的研究中扮演着重要的角色。在技术领域，检测新奇或意外的观察结果也至关重要，因为它是许多应用的核心，例如医疗诊断、文本处理、监控和安全。动机理论，特别是内在动机理论，将新奇和惊喜视为引起兴趣、激发探索或回避行为以及推动学习的主要因素之一。在这些研究中，新奇和惊喜并没有被区分开来：这两个词或多或少可以互换使用。然而，虽然新奇和惊喜确实密切相关，但它们是非常不同的。本文的目的首先是通过呈现对与新奇和惊喜相关的数学和计算建议的广泛回顾，强调新奇和惊喜之间的差异，并讨论它们之间的关系，然后探讨这对理解行为和神经科学数据的意义。我们认为，如果不能区分新奇和惊喜，那么在理解行为及其神经基础方面可能会错失很多机会。
