Macaques preferentially attend to intermediately surprising information

Abstract

Normative learning theories dictate that we should preferentially attend to informative sources, but only up to the point that our limited learning systems can process their content. Humans, including infants, show this predicted strategic deployment of attention. Here, we demonstrate that rhesus monkeys, much like humans, attend to events of moderate surprisingness over both more and less surprising events. They do this in the absence of any specific goal or contingent reward, indicating that the behavioural pattern is spontaneous. We suggest this U-shaped attentional preference represents an evolutionarily preserved strategy for guiding intelligent organisms toward material that is maximally useful for learning.

Pushing the Bounds of Bounded Optimality and Rationality

“…Furthermore, accounts on flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990;Melnikoff, Carlson, & Stillman, 2022;Wilson, Shenhav, Straccia, & Cohen, 2019), boredom (Geana, Wilson, Daw, & Cohen, 2016), curiosity (Schmidhuber, 1991), and fatigue (Agrawal et al, 2021) suggest mechanisms for investing cognitive resources not only to accommodate current bounds, but also to optimally change those bounds. In line with normative theories of learning (Dubey & Griffiths, 2020;Kidd & Hayden, 2015), human infants and macaques will allocate attention to stimuli that are intermediately surprising (Cubit, Canale, Handsman, Kidd, & Bennetto, 2021;Wu et al, 2021), and adults will self-organize their curricula to maximize learning and reward (e.g., Ten, Kaushik, Oudeyer, & Gottlieb, 2021). This research extends to other organisms, such as rats, which have been found to manage their learning strategically, trading instant rewards for faster learning (Masís, Chapman, Rhee, Cox, & Saxe, 2020).…”

Comparative curiosity: How do great apes and children deal with uncertainty?

“…In fact, some authors propose that the term curiosity, understood as the drive to seek information per se , can only apply when 1) animals sacrifice rewards in exchange for information, 2) the information obtained is not strategically beneficial for the individual and 3) there is a correlation between the amount of resources they are willing to pay and the information available for them [ 34 ]. Yet, such strict definition of curiosity is restricted to very specific scenarios [ 34 , 35 ]. For example, usual tests to determine the role of curiosity in apes problem solving abilities include responses to novel stimuli [ 36 , 37 ].…”