Long-term potentiation in the hippocampus can be enhanced and prolonged by dopaminergic inputs from midbrain structures such as the substantia nigra. This improved synaptic plasticity is hypothesized to be associated with better memory consolidation in the hippocampus. We used a condition that reliably elicits a dopaminergic response, reward anticipation, to study the relationship between activity of dopaminergic midbrain areas and hippocampal long-term memory in healthy adults. Pictures of object drawings that predicted monetary reward were associated with stronger fMRI activity in reward-related brain areas, including the substantia nigra, compared with non-reward-predicting pictures. Three weeks later, recollection and source memory were better for reward-predicting than for non-reward-predicting pictures. FMRI activity in the hippocampus and the midbrain was higher for reward-predicting pictures that were later recognized compared with later forgotten pictures. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that activation of dopaminergic midbrain regions enhances hippocampus-dependent memory formation, possibly by enhancing consolidation.

SummaryThe desire to seek new and unfamiliar experiences is a fundamental behavioral tendency in humans and other species. In economic decision making, novelty seeking is often rational, insofar as uncertain options may prove valuable and advantageous in the long run. Here, we show that, even when the degree of perceptual familiarity of an option is unrelated to choice outcome, novelty nevertheless drives choice behavior. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we show that this behavior is specifically associated with striatal activity, in a manner consistent with computational accounts of decision making under uncertainty. Furthermore, this activity predicts interindividual differences in susceptibility to novelty. These data indicate that the brain uses perceptual novelty to approximate choice uncertainty in decision making, which in certain contexts gives rise to a newly identified and quantifiable source of human irrationality.

The dopaminergic midbrain, which comprises the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA), plays a central role in reward processing. This region is also activated by novel stimuli, raising the possibility that novelty and reward have shared functional properties. It is currently unclear whether functional aspects of reward processing in the SN/VTA, namely, activation by unexpected rewards and cues that predict reward, also characterize novelty processing. To address this question, we conducted an fMRI experiment during which subjects viewed symbolic cues that predicted either novel or familiar images of scenes with 75% validity. We show that SN/VTA was activated by cues predicting novel images as well as by unexpected novel images that followed familiarity-predictive cues, an ‘unexpected novelty’ response. The hippocampus, a region implicated in detecting and encoding novel stimuli, showed an anticipatory novelty response but differed from the response profile of SN/VTA in responding at outcome to expected and ‘unexpected’ novelty. In a behavioral extension of the experiment, recollection increased relative to familiarity when comparing delayed recognition memory for anticipated novel stimuli with unexpected novel stimuli. These data reveal commonalities in SN/VTA responses to anticipating reward and anticipating novel stimuli. We suggest that this anticipatory response codes a motivational exploratory novelty signal that, together with anticipatory activation of the hippocampus, leads to enhanced encoding of novel events. In more general terms, the data suggest that dopaminergic processing of novelty might be important in driving exploration of new environments.