The DOI matches its Crossref record; 99 of the 107 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Novelty or Surprise?
Open accessAbstract
Novelty and surprise play significant roles in animal behavior and in attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying it. They also play important roles in technology, where detecting observations that are novel or surprising is central to many applications, such as medical diagnosis, text processing, surveillance, and security. Theories of motivation, particularly of intrinsic motivation, place novelty and surprise among the primary factors that arouse interest, motivate exploratory or avoidance behavior, and drive learning. In many of these studies, novelty and surprise are not distinguished from one another: the words are used more-or-less interchangeably. However, while undeniably closely related, novelty and surprise are very different. The purpose of this article is first to highlight the differences between novelty and surprise and to discuss how they are related by presenting an extensive review of mathematical and computational proposals related to them, and then to explore the implications of this for understanding behavioral and neuroscience data. We argue that opportunities for improved understanding of behavior and its neural basis are likely being missed by failing to distinguish between novelty and surprise.
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“This underwrites Bayesian experimental design [134] and active learning in statistics [135], intrinsic motivation and artificial curiosity in machine learning and robotics [136, 137, 138, 139, 140].”
From The free energy principle made simpler but not too simple (2023) · cites this paper as [138]
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Citations
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
REBUS and the anarchic brain: Toward a unified model of the brain action of psychedelics
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Latent Space Autoregression for Novelty Detection
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“According to cognitive psychology [4], novelty can be expressed either in terms of capabilities to remember an event or as a degree of surprisal [39] aroused by its observation.”
Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Barto, A., Mirolli, M., & Baldassarre, G.
- Affiliations
- University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
- National Research Council (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Barto, Andrew
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2013
- Volume
- 4
- Pages
- 907-907
- ISSN
- 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3858647
- OpenAlex
- W2085754318
- Cited by
- 397
- References
- 107
- Citations by year
- 2026: 58 · 2025: 32 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 37 · 2022: 51 · 2021: 30 · 2020: 38 · 2019: 44 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 13.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- European Commission (231722)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychological and Educational Research Studies
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Embodied and Extended Cognition
- Keywords
- novelty, surprise, intrinsic motivation, exploratory behavior, avoidance behavior, learning, psychobiology, novelty detection
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