The brain cares deeply about novelty. Electrophysiological responses to novelty can already be found in neonates, and soon in life rudimentary orienting responses appear, a more or less automatic reflex of both humans and nonhuman animals to investigative new objects or situations. Novelty also has a strong, but little understood, impact on learning. Such responses of the brain to novelty are studied extensively in psychology and neuroscience. Moreover, novelty responses are increasingly used as markers of cognition in animal research and in research on infants.
Although novelty is thus fundamental in psychology and neuroscience, surprisingly little is known about how the brain detects and responds to novelty. In a large project, my coworkers and I will try to answer fundamental, unsolved questions about novelty: Where in the brain is novelty detected? How is it detected? What consequences does its detection have in the brain and on behaviour? Techniques we are using to answer these questions include electrophysiology, rodent studies, psychopharmacology, behavioural methods and computational modelling. We hope our work will allows us to develop an empirically-based computational model that identifies the whole trajectory of a novel stimulus through the brain: From sensory analysis to the motor command that instructs the eyes and hands to inspect the stimulus.
The programme will help us understand how learning benefits
from novelty, how novelty guides exploration of the world, and how
memories are established and retrieved in the process of detecting
novelty. It will elucidate what researchers actually measure when they
use novelty responses as markers of cognition. The programme may result
in adjustments of the role of novelty and surprise in education (are
its effects really only positive?), and could help research on clinical
diseases in which novelty processing is thought to be deviant (e.g.,
schizophrenia).