Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary.
Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Scand J Psychol. 2022 Aug;63(4):308-320. doi: 10.1111/sjop.12807. Epub 2022 Apr 7.
Novelty is defined as the part of an experience that is not yet represented by memory systems. Novelty has been claimed to exert various memory-enhancing effects. A pioneering study by Wittmann et al. (2007) has shown that memory formation may even benefit from the expectation of novelty. We aimed to replicate this assumed memory effect in four behavioral studies. However, our results do not support the idea that anticipated novel stimuli are more memorable than unexpected novelty. In our experiments, we systematically manipulated the novelty predicting cues to ensure that the expectations were correctly formed by the participants, however, the results showed that there was no memory enhancement for expected novel pictures in any of the examined indices, thus we could not replicate the main behavioral finding of Wittmann et al. (2007). These results call into question the original effect, and we argue that this fits more into current thinking on memory formation and brain function in general. Our results are more consistent with the view that unexpected stimuli are more likely to be retained by memory systems. Predictive coding theory suggests that unexpected stimuli are prioritized by the nervous system and this may also benefit memory processes. Novel stimuli may be unexpected and thus recognized better in some experimental setups, yet novelty and unexpectedness do not always coincide. We hope that our work can bring more consistency in the literature on novelty, as educational methods in general could also benefit from this clarification.
新颖性被定义为尚未被记忆系统所代表的体验的一部分。新颖性被认为具有各种增强记忆的效果。Wittmann 等人（2007 年）的一项开创性研究表明，记忆的形成甚至可能受益于对新颖性的预期。我们旨在通过四项行为研究来复制这种假设的记忆效应。然而，我们的结果并不支持预期的新颖刺激比意外的新颖刺激更易被记住的观点。在我们的实验中，我们系统地操纵了新颖性预测线索，以确保参与者正确地形成预期，然而，结果表明，在任何被检查的指标中，预期的新颖图片都没有记忆增强，因此我们无法复制 Wittmann 等人（2007 年）的主要行为发现。这些结果对原始效应提出了质疑，我们认为这更符合当前关于记忆形成和大脑功能的一般思维。我们的结果更符合这样一种观点，即意外的刺激更有可能被记忆系统保留。预测编码理论表明，意外的刺激会被神经系统优先处理，这也可能有益于记忆过程。新的刺激可能是意外的，因此在某些实验设置中可能会更好地被识别，但新颖性和意外性并不总是一致的。我们希望我们的工作能够为新颖性文献带来更多的一致性，因为一般的教育方法也可以从中受益。
