Novelty Processing in Aging: Absence of an Association with Episodic Memory Abilities

Conceptually, novelty processing and episodic memory are closely linked. Yet it remains unclear whether they rely on common or partly independent mechanisms. We investigated whether their relationship depends on the type of novelty and representational content in healthy older adults. Seventy-eight adults aged 61–84 years completed eye-tracking tasks assessing Absolute novelty (unknown stimuli) and Associative novelty (novel configurations of familiar elements) for objects and scenes, as well as a pupillometry task assessing responses to novel objects. Novelty-processing indices were correlated with performance across various episodic memory tasks using preregistered Bayesian correlations. Older adults showed reliable gaze preferences for both Absolute and Associative novelty in object and scene tasks. Contrary to our predictions, however, Absolute novelty preference was generally unrelated to performance on familiarity-based recognition and perceptual discrimination measures hypothesized to rely on the perirhinal cortex. Associative novelty preference was likewise largely unrelated to episodic memory performance, although a small number of unexpected associations with verbal recall emerged for object novelty. Novelty-related pupil responses also showed little evidence of associations with memory performance. Exploratory comparisons with data from younger adults aged 18-30 years (from Servais & Bastin, 2026) indicated largely comparable gaze-based novelty preferences across age groups, although novelty-related peak pupil dilation was reduced in older adults. Overall, these findings suggest that individual differences in novelty processing, when assessed in paradigms with no memory confound, are largely independent of episodic memory performance in healthy older adults and that gaze-based novelty processing may remain preserved with age for both novelty types.