The ability to perceive novelty in the surrounding environment and memorize the changes has been crucial for all species throughout evolution. Exploring novel environments induces memory...Show moreThe ability to perceive novelty in the surrounding environment and memorize the changes has been crucial for all species throughout evolution. Exploring novel environments induces memory consolidation mechanisms and may facilitate consolidating even weakly encoded, unrelated events into long-term memory. Based on animal studies, exposure to novelty activates dopaminergic neuronal networks and, thus, the memory consolidation mechanisms. These networks mature and deteriorate throughout human development, but the consequences to environmental novelty-related responses in memory are still unknown. This study examined the effects of environmental novelty on verbal and landmark memory in different ages throughout human development. In the present study, participants (n = 439) in different age groups explored novel or familiar VR environments in two exploration rounds, with landmarks presented on the second round. Simultaneously, their paths in the VR environment were constantly tracked. Afterwards, words were introduced during a deep or shallow encoding task, and the level of the memory performance for recalling words and recognizing words and landmarks was measured. As expected, adolescents and young adults benefited more from environmental novelty on word recall and recognition than children or older adults. The words were recalled better after an exposure to a novel rather than to a familiar environment and in deep rather than in shallow learning conditions. In general, novelty did not interact with age or learning condition, except slightly in recognition task. In deep learning, younger adults benefited significantly more from novelty than children. In shallow learning, adolescents benefited significantly more from novelty than older adults or children. Landmarks were recognized better in a familiar rather than novel environment, and adolescents and younger adults recognized more landmarks than other age groups. The tendency to explore novel paths instead of familiar ones predicted the level of word and landmark recognition, but not for word recall. Older age was not associated with a reduced tendency to explore novel paths. As a conclusion, younger individuals benefit more from environmental novelty than older adults, who generally show novelty detriment – this is in line with the developmental changes in the dopaminergic system.Show less
