Surprise and novelty in the brain

Mindfulness, curiosity, and creativity

“…By doing so we show that although several variables interact in the process of curiosity and creativity, as alluded to in the target article, novelty-seeking best explains the underlying basis of human curiosity and creativity. Interestingly, our assumption is supported by recent computational evidence showing that when exploring complex environments, novelty-seeking is the most probable model of human behavior, outperforming seeking information-gain or surprise (Modirshanechi, Becker, Brea, & Gerstner, 2023). We encourage future research to empirically test whether different types of novelty commonly guide curiosity and creativity.…”

Representational similarity modulates neural and behavioral signatures of novelty

“…Some count-based models compute the state familiarity with simpler functions that, for example, consider absolute counts rather than state frequencies [18,20,22,23] or only consider binary counts [14,46]. Since these models can all be reformulated in terms of the empirical frequency p [24,32], we focus on frequency-based novelty models as in Eq. 1 for the rest of the manuscript.…”

“…where the negative logarithm is a standard choice of nonlinearity in the novelty literature [24,47]. The combination of empirical count-based frequency (Eq.…”

“…Computational models of novelty are valuable tools to explain and predict the effects of novelty signaling on neural activity and behaviour [14,15,[18][19][20][21]. Existing computational novelty models often compute novelty as a decreasing function of the number of times a stimulus has been encountered previously ('count-based' novelty [18,20,22,23], see [24] for a review). Some variations of these models consider only binary counts [14,18], i.e.…”

Exploratory exploitation and exploitative exploration: The phenomenology of play and the computational dynamics of search

“…Second, these shared mechanisms initiate downstream processing of the "novel" stimulus or association (Ivancovsky et al). However, although Ivancovsky et al use "novelty" as a general notion, distinct intrinsic motivations contributing to curiosity (e.g., novelty, surprise, information gain) are mathematically well-defined (Barto et al, 2013;Modirshanechi et al, 2022), have different neural signatures (Akiti et al, 2022;Morrens et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2021;, and are triggered by different statistical regularities of the task or environment (Maheu et al, 2019) (see Modirshanechi et al, 2023a, for a review). For example, novelty signals are triggered by unfamiliar stimuli and situations, both when the unfamiliarity is expected and when it is unexpected (Homann et al, 2022).…”