Process Account of Curiosity and Interest: A Reward-Learning Perspective

Murayama, Kou; FitzGibbon, Lily; Sakaki, Michiko

doi:10.1007/s10648-019-09499-9

Cited by 153 publications

(126 citation statements)

References 99 publications

(145 reference statements)

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“…One possibility is that knowledge acquisition is inherently valuable (Kidd & Hayden, 2014;Murayama, FitzGibbon & Sakaki, 2019;Marvin & Shohamy, 2016), even when people acquire knowledge about negative social situations that involve death, violence or harm.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is reflected in stronger activation of reward circuitry (e.g., NAcc, caudate, putamen) that might track the expected value of knowledge acquisition, or the salience of the information (Bartra et al, 2013). Note that we focus here on the informational value of valenced stimuli in epistemic terms (Berlyne, 1966;Loewenstein, 1994;Litman, 2005;Murayama et al, 2019; see also Tamir, 2016), but the value of choosing to engage with negative or positive stimuli may also lie in the emotional experiences or sensations that are evoked by the stimulus (Zuckerman, 1979;Zuckerman & Litle, 1986).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Choosing to view morbid information involves reward circuitry

Oosterwijk

Snoek

Tekoppele³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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People often seek out stories, videos or images that detail death, violence or harm.Considering the ubiquity of this behavior, it is surprising that we know very little about the neural circuits involved in choosing negative information. Here we show that choosing intensely negative stimuli engages similar brain regions as those that support extrinsic incentives and "regular" curiosity. Participants made choices to view negative and positive images, based on negative (e.g., a soldier kicks a civilian against his head) and positive (e.g., children throw flower petals at a wedding) verbal cues. We hypothesized that the conflicting, but relatively informative act of choosing to view a negative image, resulted in stronger activation of reward circuitry as opposed to the relatively uncomplicated act of choosing to view a positive stimulus. Indeed, as preregistered, we found that choosing negative cues was associated with activation of the striatum, inferior frontal gyrus, anterior insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, both when contrasting against a passive viewing condition, and when contrasting against positive cues. These findings nuance models of decision-making, valuation and curiosity, and are an important starting point when considering the value of seeking out negative content.Humans are active agents who often deliberately expose themselves to "morbid" information (e.g., information involving death, violence or harm). People choose to watch gruesome documentaries, click on links detailing terrifying attacks and visit locations of horrible events. Surprisingly, the fact that people experience curiosity for negative information, and often act on this feeling, is rarely addressed in theoretical models of curiosity and decision-making. Moreover, empirical work on this phenomenon is markedly limited and studies investigating the neural circuits involved in choosing negative information are virtually non-existent. Nevertheless, "morbid curiosity" is an important topic for investigation, because this ubiquitous behavior appears to be at odds with the idea that value and reward drive human information seeking. The present paper aims to expand the scientific enquiry of curiosity and choice, by investigating how the brain, and reward-related brain regions in particular, represent a deliberate choice to view intensely negative images that portray death, violence or harm.In the last decades, much progress has been made in understanding the neuroscience of choice, valuation and curiosity. Yet, when studying choice, decision-making scientists typically focus on extrinsically rewarding stimuli, such as monetary rewards (Braver, Krug,

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Choosing to view morbid information involves reward circuitry

Oosterwijk

Snoek

Tekoppele³

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Like prior researchers, we consider curiosity as information-seeking but we are agnostic to whether it is driven by intrinsic or extrinsic motivations. Some researchers have also advocated for adopting a similar viewpoint (Kidd & Hayden, 2015;Murayama et al, 2018). Taking this approach helps us to better understand and relate different strands of curiosity research into a common framework.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconciling novelty and complexity through a rational analysis of curiosity.

Dubey

Griffiths

2020

Psychological Review

140

138

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the anonymous reviewers for helpful discussions and comments. A preliminary version of the model and its evaluation (Experiment 1) was presented at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society and appeared in the conference proceedings. This work has been updated and extended for inclusion in the current article. RATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CURIOSITY 2 AbstractCuriosity is considered to be the essence of science and an integral component of cognition. What prompts curiosity in a learner? Previous theoretical accounts of curiosity remain dividednovelty-based theories propose that new and highly uncertain stimuli pique curiosity whereas complexity-based theories propose that stimuli with an intermediate degree of uncertainty stimulate curiosity. In this article, we present a rational analysis of curiosity by considering the computational problem underlying curiosity, which allows us to model these distinct accounts of curiosity in a common framework. Our approach posits that a rational agent should explore stimuli that maximally increase the usefulness of its knowledge and that curiosity is the mechanism by which humans approximate this rational behavior. Critically, our analysis show that the causal structure of the environment can determine whether curiosity is driven by either highly uncertain or moderately uncertain stimuli. This suggests that previous theories need not be in contention but are special cases of a more general account of curiosity. Experimental results confirm our predictions and demonstrate that our theory explains a wide range of findings about human curiosity, including its subjectivity and malleability.

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“…Opinions vary widely. While some authors argue that there is little to distinguish curiosity and interest (Ainley 2019;Alexander 2019), others emphasize important conceptual and possibly neuroscientific differences between the two (Hidi and Renninger 2019;Murayama et al 2019;Shin and Kim 2019). One author suggests that curiosity may be a special case of interest (Pekrun 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Curiosity and Situational Interest: Distant Cousins or Identical Twins?

Schmidt

Rotgans

2020

Educ Psychol Rev

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To what extent are epistemic curiosity and situational interest different indicators for the same underlying psychological mechanism? To answer this question, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, we administered measures of epistemic curiosity and situational interest to 158 students from an all-boys secondary school. The data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis to find out whether a one-factor or a two-factor solution provides the best fit to the data. The findings supported a one-factor solution. A twofactor solution was only satisfactorily supported if one accepted that the two latent constructs were correlated .99. Study 2 was an experiment in which we experimentally manipulated the amount of prior knowledge 148 students had about a particular thermodynamic phenomenon. Epistemic curiosity and situational interest were each measured four times: before a text was studied, before and after a problem was presented, and after a second text was read. The treatment group studied a text explaining the problem after the problem was presented, whereas the control group read it before the problem was presented. The control group, in other words, gained prior knowledge about the problem. In the treatment group, both epistemic curiosity and situational interest significantly increased while being confronted with the problem. This was not the case in the control group. In addition, only in the treatment group scores on both measures significantly decreased after the text explaining the problem was studied. These findings support a knowledge gap account of both situational interest and epistemic curiosity, suggesting an identical underlying psychological mechanism.

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Process Account of Curiosity and Interest: A Reward-Learning Perspective

Cited by 153 publications

References 99 publications

Choosing to view morbid information involves reward circuitry

Choosing to view morbid information involves reward circuitry

Reconciling novelty and complexity through a rational analysis of curiosity.

Epistemic Curiosity and Situational Interest: Distant Cousins or Identical Twins?

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