What form of memory underlies novelty preferences?

Novelty preferences (longer fixations on new stimuli than on previously presented stimuli) are widely used to assess memory in nonverbal populations, such as human infants and experimental animals, yet important questions remain about the nature of the processes that underlie them. We used a classical conditioning paradigm to test whether novelty preferences reflect (1) a stimulus-driven bias toward novelty in visual selective attention or (2) explicit memory for old stimuli. Results indicated that conditioning affected adults’ looking behavior in the visual paired comparison, but not their recognition memory judgments. Furthermore, the typically observed novelty preference occurred only when a bias toward novelty had no competition from a bias toward salience due to conditioning. These results suggest that novelty preferences may reflect attentional processes and implicit memory to a greater degree than explicit memory, a finding with important implications for understanding memory in nonverbal populations and the development of memory in humans.