Novelty

…publication, an explanation of novelty and significance, the eligible authors’ birth dates, and support letters. The award is presented through the Ecological Society of America. Nominations close on 19 November 2026.

In various situations, individuals can display different attitudes towards novelty. Sometimes individuals gravitate towards novelty while other times they avoid it. This is referred to as neophilia and neophobia respectively. Understanding these opposing attitudes towards novelty can elucidate various aspects of life, like adaptive behavior, memory, and anxiety, but first there need to be reliable paradigms. Recently, attention has been directed toward establishing such paradigms in birds. We administered two tasks assessing neophilia and neophobia in pigeons to measure both behaviors in the s

The ability of organism to detect and respond to novelty is critical to adaptation in a changing environment. Here we studied how brain activity changes as environmental novelty decreases. To this end, we placed mice in an open field (OF) to explore it in four daily sessions and showed a significant decrease in exploration from days 1 to 4. We then analyzed the brain activity by imaging c-Fos expression after mice explored the OF once (high novelty) or four times (low novelty) and found that the decrease in novelty was accompanied by a decrease in cortical (prefrontal, retrosplenial, and somat

…the effects of task factors like risk, novelty, prior knowledge, arousal and attention are under-explored. We designed a new computer-based experiment where participants could firstly explore a list of different author’s paintings or quotes and then select items with the same authorship. Most participants showed improvement in performance, yet factors, including previous progress, risk and novelty conditions, pupil diameter and heart rate, p

…intrinsic reward signals (novelty, surprise, and information-gain) and ask which one explains human exploration best. We design an experimental paradigm for multi-step decision-making where the three representative intrinsic