Topic: spontaneous curiosity

Across animal species, novel stimuli elicit arousal and evoke sensory inspection and exploration. This type of spontaneous curiosity critically relies on the animals’ ability to identify the novelty of a sensory stimulus against previously experienced stimuli. However, since familiarity is characterized by the absence of a behavioural responses, passive novelty detection tasks involve asymmetric motor responses which can confound the analysis of neural signals. To address this limitation, I established a two alternative forced choice novelty detection task which offers the opportunity to inves