Exploring a novel environment improves motivation and promotes recall of words

Abstract

Active exploration of novel environments is known to increase plasticity in animals, promoting long-term potentiation in the hippocampus and enhancing memory formation. These effects can occur during as well as after exploration. In humans novelty’s effects on memory have been investigated with other methods, but never in an active exploration paradigm. We therefore investigated whether active spatial exploration of a novel compared to a previously familiarized virtual environment promotes performance on an unrelated word learning task. Exploration of the novel environment enhanced recall, generally thought to be hippocampus-dependent, but not recognition, believed to rely less on the hippocampus. Recall was better for participants that gave higher presence ratings for their experience in the virtual environment. These ratings were higher for the novel compared to the familiar virtual environment, suggesting that novelty increased attention for the virtual rather than real environment; however, this did not explain the effect of novelty on recall.

Novelty's effect on memory encoding

“…For example, Fenker et al (2008) showed a series of either novel or familiar images a few minutes before learning, and found that the novel images yielded better learning. This finding was recently replicated using virtual reality environments: Exploring a novel environment resulting in better encoding of words a few minutes after exploration ended, relative to exploring a familiar environment (Schomaker, van Bronkhorst & Meeter, 2015). Both findings are consistent with reports that exploring a novel environment results in the release of acetylcholine on the scale of minutes (Giovannini et al, 2001), and with studies showing dopaminergic effects on plasticity lasting minutes (Li, Cullen, Anwyl, & Rowan, 2003).…”

Influence of reward motivation on human declarative memory

“…A first animal demonstration showed that novelty exploration indeed can facilitate consolidation in subsequent declarative memory formation and lead to improved recall 24 h later (Salvetti et al, 2014). Similar effects of novelty exploration in humans, have so far been reported for immediate memory tests (Fenker et al, 2008;Schomaker et al, 2014). Also in this domain, there is preliminary evidence that transfer in training of some skills may depend on individual differences in prefrontal dopamine availability.…”

Novelty processing and memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease: A review

“…These paradigms generally expose participants to novelty, then have them study new information. Such paradigms have been shown to improve subsequent memory for information learnt after an exposure to novelty compared with performance after exposure to familiar information (e.g., Fenker et al, 2008;Schomaker et al, 2014).…”