Effects of exploring a novel environment on memory across the lifespan

Exploration is a crucial aspect of mammalian behavior, and new environments provide unique opportunities to learn. Exploration of a novel environment has been shown to promote memory formation in healthy adults, even for unrelated events. Studies in animals have suggested that such novelty-induced memory boosts are mediated by hippocampal dopamine. The dopaminergic system is known to develop and deteriorate over the lifespan, but so far, the effects of novelty on memory across the lifespan have not yet been investigated. In the current study, we used novel and previously familiarized virtual environments to pinpoint the effects of spatial novelty on declarative memory in humans across the lifespan. After exploring a novel or familiar environment, participants were presented a list of words, and either performed a semantic task (deep encoding) or judged whether the first letter of the shown word was open or closed (shallow encoding). Incidental memory was quantified in a surprise test. Our sample (n = 439) included children, adolescents, younger adults, and older adults. Results showed that participants in the deep encoding condition remembered more words than those in the shallow condition, but novelty did not influence this effect. Interestingly, however, children, adolescents and younger adults benefitted from exploring a novel compared to a familiar environment as evidenced by better word recall, while these effects were absent in older adults. Our findings suggest that the beneficial effects of novelty on memory follow the deterioration of pathways in the brain involved in novelty-related processing across the lifespan.