NOVITAS: A stimulus database with new tasks and metrics for assessing absolute and associative novelty detection in objects and scenes.

The ability to detect novelty is crucial for survival, yet it is complex. To capture this complexity, researchers distinguish between different types of novelty, as neuroscientific evidence shows that distinct brain circuits process novelty depending on its nature. Absolute novelty refers to stimuli that are entirely unfamiliar to the observer and is thought to rely on the perirhinal cortex, whereas associative novelty arises from unfamiliar combinations of familiar elements and is presumably detected by the hippocampus. Despite this distinction, methodological tools specifically designed to investigate different forms of novelty remain scarce. Moreover, given that the perirhinal cortex supports object processing and the hippocampus scene processing, it remains unclear how novelty is detected across representational levels. To address this gap, we developed the NOVITAS database, enabling direct and systematic comparison of absolute and associative novelty for objects and scenes within the same experimental tasks. We provide a large database of stimuli that assess novelty detection without prior lab exposure, relying solely on pre-existing knowledge. To do so, stimulus novelty was validated in a normative online study with younger (N = 104) and older adults (N = 184). We then substantially adapted classic novelty-detection tasks—an Oddball-like paradigm (N = 24) and a modified Visual Paired Comparison task (N = 76)—and validated that our stimuli elicit behavioral and eye-tracking novelty markers in young adults. Results confirmed that participants looked longer at novel than familiar images, but the time course of novelty preference differed across conditions, suggesting that the stimuli can probe different underlying mechanisms.