Costly curiosity: People pay a price to resolve an uncertain gamble early

Abstract

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How curiosity enhances hippocampus-dependent memory: The Prediction-Appraisal-Curiosity-Exploration (PACE) Framework

“…For example, blockade of D1/D5 dopaminergic receptors during exploration of novel environments decreases the consolidation of new spatial maps [66], suggesting a causal link between exploration-triggered dopamine and memory consolidation. Also consistent with the idea that curiosity triggers enhanced information seeking, several studies have shown how nonhuman primates and humans have a strong preference for advance information-seeking [14,20,[69][70][71]. That is, if individuals have the possibility of receiving advance information about the value of an upcoming reward, they have a strong bias to select the advance information even if this option is associated with sacrificing parts of the reward.…”

A reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition: An integrated account of curiosity, interest, and intrinsic–extrinsic rewards.

“…Research on curiosity is generally concerned with psychological and computational mechanisms underlying information-seeking behavior, especially when information bears no implications for acquiring extrinsic rewards (Gottlieb & Oudeyer, 2018). Research has shown that humans (and animals) often prefer acquiring information even if the information is not instrumental to earn rewards (e.g., Bennett, Bode, Brydevall, Warren, & Murawski, 2016;Blanchard, Hayden, & Bromberg-Martin, 2014;Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009;Brydevall, Bennett, Murawski, & Bode, 2018;FitzGibbon, Komiya, & Murayama, 2020;Lanzetta & Driscoll, 1966;Rodriguez Cabrero, Zhu, & Ludvig, 2019;Wang & Hayden, 2019;Wyckoff Jr, 1952; see also Grant, Kajii, & Polak, 1998).…”

Anxious and obsessive-compulsive traits are independently associated with valuation of noninstrumental information.

“…This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. nès, Woodford, & Gottlieb, 2019;Rodriguez Cabrero, Zhu, & Ludvig, 2019;van Lieshout, Vandenbroucke, Müller, Cools, & de Lange, 2018;Vasconcelos, Monteiro, & Kacelnik, 2015), even though this leads to a reduction in future expected reward. In humans, there is marked heterogeneity in the strength of this preference (Bennett et al, 2016), suggesting individual differences in aversion to uncertainty that resemble those proposed in theories of obsessive-compulsion and anxiety (Krohne, 1993;Sorrentino et al, 1990).…”

“…This behavior is also unconfounded by threat overestimation or risk aversion, since these confounds are induced by the instrumentality of information. Previous research has shown that humans and other animals behave as though noninstrumental information has an intrinsic value, and will even pay an explicit cost (such as a monetary cost, a wait-time cost, or foregone primary reward) to acquire it (Bennett et al, 2016; Blanchard, Hayden, & Bromberg-Martin, 2015; Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009, 2011; Brydevall et al, 2018; Charpentier, Bromberg-Martin, & Sharot, 2018; Iigaya, Story, Kurth-Nelson, Dolan, & Dayan, 2016; Kobayashi, Ravaioli, Baranès, Woodford, & Gottlieb, 2019; Rodriguez Cabrero, Zhu, & Ludvig, 2019; van Lieshout, Vandenbroucke, Müller, Cools, & de Lange, 2018; Vasconcelos, Monteiro, & Kacelnik, 2015), even though this leads to a reduction in future expected reward. In humans, there is marked heterogeneity in the strength of this preference (Bennett et al, 2016), suggesting individual differences in aversion to uncertainty that resemble those proposed in theories of obsessive-compulsion and anxiety (Krohne, 1993; Sorrentino et al, 1990).…”