Topic: novelty exposure

Exposure to novelty around the time of weak training enhances long-term memory (Ballarini et al., 2009). This enhancement is conserved across rodent models to humans (Fenker et al., 2009). It was proposed that synapses have been ‘tagged’ during the weak training and captured later by the strong event, i.e. novelty exposure (Moncada et al., 2007; Lisman et al., 2011). Concurrently, novelty induces dopamine and noradrenaline release in the hippocampus which similarly enhances memories (Moncada et al., 2011; Duszkiewicz et al., 2019). However, the synaptic and molecular changes induced by novelty

The ability to modify established behavior in novel situations is essential. We designed a behavioral paradigm to test whether novelty exposure facilitates behavioral flexibility. Male mice ran free choice sessions in which they can freely choose an arm of a T-maze to get a reward for 3 days. As a result, mice developed an efficient strategy to simply choose one particular side 90 % of the time (arm bias). The following day, mice were exposed to either a novel or familiar arena and trained on a delayed-non-match-to-sample flexible choice task. Mice had to learn to overcome their established bi