Novelty is a potent driver of learning, but little is known about whether anticipation of novelty can enhance memory for incidental information. Here, participants incidentally encountered objects while they actively navigated toward novel or previously familiarized virtual rooms. Across immediate and delayed surprise memory tests, participants showed superior recollection for incidental objects encountered while anticipating novel as compared with familiarized rooms. Furthermore, memory for incidental objects correlated positively with between-participants average curiosity about novel rooms but negatively with within-participants trial-specific curiosity. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on how salient processes impact memory for incidental material.

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From ancient years, the body has been the center of all sensations through which humans experienced and interacted with the outer world. Over the years, this idea hasn’t evolved much, giving rise to theories indicating the durability and rigidness of self-constructed body representations. However, numerous studies in the field of body distortions, out-of-body, and body ownership illusions have brought an end to this previously unquestionable belief. In this review, key experimental findings from these studies are presented and how they shaped the future of the field is explored. Recently, the digital revolution brought a new era to body ownership illusion research through the rise of immersive virtual reality. Since then, several studies have examined the role of virtual reality in the induction of body ownership illusions, focusing on aspects such as visuotactile and visuomotor stimulation, visual perspective, and virtual body appearance. Important findings from these studies are discussed, with conclusions being made with caution, and directions for future work are being proposed.

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Novelty is known to be a potent learning signal and has intrinsic motivational value, but little is known whether anticipation of novelty can enhance memory for incidental information that is encountered during the anticipation period. It is also unclear how anticipation of novelty relates to other intrinsic motivational states such as curiosity. Here, we used a newly developed VR paradigm in which participants actively navigated towards novel or previously familiarised rooms, and incidentally encountered objects on their way to the rooms. Across immediate and delayed surprise memory tests, participants showed superior recollection for incidental objects encountered while anticipating novel rooms as compared to familiar rooms, indicating a beneficial effect of novelty anticipation on memory for incidental information. Moreover, participants who reported higher curiosity for novel rooms exhibited more memory enhancement for incidental objects, suggesting that curiosity might be one important factor contributing to novelty-related memory enhancements.