ArticleFrontiers in psychology2013
Novelty or surprise?
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 98 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
98 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The Neural Blueprint of Novelty: A Meta-Analytic Dissection of Active and Passive Novelty Processing Networks.Brain and behavior · 2026Pooled it
- Effects of exergames on student physical education learning in the context of the artificial intelligence era: a meta-analysis.Scientific reports · 2024Pooled it
- Active inference and artificial reasoning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Free Energy Principle and Free Markets.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Autonomy in learning: Predictability modulates the beneficial effect of choice on memory.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Subjective semantic search space as an estimate of prior knowledge predicts curiosity to learn among younger and older adults.Psychology and aging · 2026Article
- From Spontaneous Ignitions to Sensorimotor Cell Assemblies via Dopamine: A Spiking Neurocomputational Model of Infants' Hand Action Acquisition.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Distributionally robust free energy principle for decision-making.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Experiencing Novelty in Adolescence and the Influence of Prior Novelty-Related Experiences on Adult Behavioral Outcomes in Wistar Han Rats.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Cholinergic Dynamics in the Septo-hippocampal System Provide Phasic Multiplexed Signals for Spatial Novelty and Correlate with Behavioral States.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Novelty as a drive of human exploration in complex stochastic environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Pathfinding: a neurodynamical account of intuition.Communications biology · 2025Review
- Article
- Brain network dynamics predict moments of surprise across contexts.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Cholinergic dynamics in the septo-hippocampal system provide phasic multiplexed signals for spatial novelty and correlate with behavioral states.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Consciousness, mindfulness, and introspection: integrating first- and second-person phenomenological inquiry with experimental and EEG data to study the mind.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Decoding Salience: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation of Reward and Contextual Unexpectedness in Memory Encoding and Retrieval.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Irrationality in humans and creativity in AI.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2025Review
- Surprising sounds influence risky decision making.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Dynamic adaptation to novelty in the brain is related to arousal and intelligence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
38 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Novelty and surprise play significant roles in animal behavior and in attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying it. They also play important roles in technology, where detecting observations that are novel or surprising is central to many applications, such as medical diagnosis, text processing, surveillance, and security. Theories of motivation, particularly of intrinsic motivation, place novelty and surprise among the primary factors that arouse interest, motivate exploratory or avoidance behavior, and drive learning. In many of these studies, novelty and surprise are not distinguished from one another: the words are used more-or-less interchangeably. However, while undeniably closely related, novelty and surprise are very different. The purpose of this article is first to highlight the differences between novelty and surprise and to discuss how they are related by presenting an extensive review of mathematical and computational proposals related to them, and then to explore the implications of this for understanding behavioral and neuroscience data. We argue that opportunities for improved understanding of behavior and its neural basis are likely being missed by failing to distinguish between novelty and surprise.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.