What kinds of novel information are remembered well? The novelty effect and its neural mechanisms.
Published: 2007
Language: eng
Number of pages: 71
ISBN-13: 9780494274057
Description: The "novelty effect" describes the tendency of novel material to be remembered better than familiar material. Two experiments measured memory for proverbs to explore this effect. Participants studied proverbs that were familiar, novel in terms of a single detail, or entirely novel, then completed a recognition memory test. In the first experiment, stimuli were familiar due to in-lab pre-familiarization; in the second, due to previous experience. Participants performed better with novel proverbs when familiarization occurred in-lab, but not when familiarization relied upon prior knowledge. Next, an fMRI novelty-encoding dataset was reanalyzed using a PLS analysis with a seed planted in the left hippocampus. Correlations involving the left hippocampus and prefrontal cortex were found to be weak in familiar and syntactic novelty conditions, and negative for conditions involving semantic novelty. Together, these results indicate humans preferentially encode a specific type of novel information: episodes semantically distinct from recently encountered ones.
Notes: Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 3311.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2007.

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