ArticleFrontiers in psychology2014
Exploring a novel environment improves motivation and promotes recall of words.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Effectiveness and User Experience of Immersive Virtual Reality in Cognitive Rehabilitation for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Systematic Review.JMIR mental health · 2025Pooled it
- Neural and Navigational Features Influencing the Novelty Induced Benefits on Episodic Memory.Hippocampus · 2026Article
- Charting the Unknown : Sex Differences in Spatial Exploration Across the Lifespan.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- A new treatment approach to conduct disorder and callous-unemotional traits: an assessment of the acceptability, appropriateness, and feasibility of Impact VR.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Altered hierarchical auditory predictive processing after lesions to the orbitofrontal cortex.eLife · 2024Article
- Reduction in the activity of VTA/SNc dopaminergic neurons underlies aging-related decline in novelty seeking.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Review
- Enhancing learning and retention with distinctive virtual reality environments and mental context reinstatement.NPJ science of learning · 2022Article
- Novel immersive virtual reality experiences do not produce retroactive memory benefits for unrelated material.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2022Article
- Effects of exploring a novel environment on memory across the lifespan.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Tag and capture: how salient experiences target and rescue nearby events in memory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2022Review
- Expectation of irrelevant novel stimuli has no consistent effect on recognition memory.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2022Article
- A bias toward the unknown: individual and environmental factors influencing exploratory behavior.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2022Article
- Novelty exposure induces stronger sensorimotor representations during a manual adaptation task.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2022Article
- Comparing virtual reality, desktop-based 3D, and 2D versions of a category learning experiment.PloS one · 2022Article
- Anticipation of novel environments enhances memory for incidental information.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- A predictive account of how novelty influences declarative memory.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2021Article
- Exploration of a novel virtual environment improves memory consolidation in ADHD.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The gains of a 4-week cognitive training are not modulated by novelty.Human brain mapping · 2020Article
- How to optimize knowledge construction in the brain.NPJ science of learning · 2020Review
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
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.
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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.