The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity

Abstract

Curiosity is a basic element of our cognition, but its biological function, mechanisms, and neural underpinning remain poorly understood. It is nonetheless a motivator for learning, influential in decision-making, and crucial for healthy development. One factor limiting our understanding of it is the lack of a widely agreed upon delineation of what is and is not curiosity. Another factor is the dearth of standardized laboratory tasks that manipulate curiosity in the lab. Despite these barriers, recent years have seen a major growth of interest in both the neuroscience and psychology of curiosity. In this Perspective, we advocate for the importance of the field, provide a selective overview of its current state, and describe tasks that are used to study curiosity and information-seeking. We propose that, rather than worry about defining curiosity, it is more helpful to consider the motivations for information-seeking behavior and to study it in its ethological context.

Figure 1

A: Data from Kinney & Kagan (1976). Attention to auditory stimuli shows an inverted U-shaped pattern, with infants making the most fixations to auditory stimuli estimated to be moderately discrepant from the auditory stimuli for which infants already possessed mental representations. B: Data from Kang et al. (2009): Subjects were most curious about the answers to trivia questions for which they were moderately confident about their answers. This pattern suggests that subjects exhibited the greatest curiosity for information that was partially—but not fully—encoded.

Figure 2

A. In a four-arm restless bandit task, subjects choose on each trial from one of four targets. B. The value associated with each option changes in value (uncued) stochastically on each trial. Consequently, when the subject has identified the best target, there is a benefit to occasionally interspersing trials where an alternative is chosen (exploration) into the more common pattern of choosing the known best option (exploitation). For example, the subject may choose option A (red color) for several trials but would not know that blue (B) will soon overtake A in value without occasionally exploring other options. C. In this task, neurons in posterior cingulate cortex show higher tonic firing on explore trials than on exploit trials.

Figure 3

A. In the curiosity tradeoff task, subjects choose between two gambles that vary in informativeness (cyan vs. magenta) and gamble stakes (the size of the white inset bar). On each trial, two gambles appear in sequence on a computer screen (indicated by a black rectangle); when both options appear, subjects shift gaze to one to select it. Then, following 2.25 seconds, they receive a juice reward. Following choice of the informative option, they receive a cue telling them whether they get the reward (50% chance); following choice of the uninformative option, subjects get not valid information. B. Two subjects both showed a preference for informative options (indicated by a left shift of the psychometric curve) over uninformative ones, despite the fact that this information provided no strategic benefit. C. In this task, OFC does not integrate value due to information (vertical axis) with value due to reward size (horizontal axis).

Figure 4

A: Example display from Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin (2012). Each display featured 3 unique boxes hiding 3 unique objects that revealed themselves one at a time according to one of 32 sequences of varying complexity. The sequence continued until the infant looked away for 1-second. B: Infant look-away data plotted by complexity (information content) as estimated by an ideal observer model over the transitional probabilities. The U-shaped pattern indicates that infants were least likely to look away at events with intermediate information content. Infants probability of looking away was greatest to events of either very low information content (highly predictable) or very high information content (highly surprising), consistent with an attentional strategy that aims to maintain intermediate rates of information absorption.

Figure 5

Experimental stimuli from Schulz & Bonawitz (2007). When both levers were pressed simultaneously, two puppets (a straw pompom and a chick) emerged from the center of the box. In this confounded case, the evidence was not informative about which of the two levers caused each puppet to rise. In the unconfounded conditions, one lever was pressed at a time, making it clear which lever caused each puppet to rise. During a free-play period following the toy's demonstration, children played more with the toy when the demonstrated evidence was confounded.