The Lure of Counterfactual Curiosity: People Incur a Cost to Experience Regret

FitzGibbon, Lily; Komiya, Asuka; Murayama, Kou

doi:10.1177/0956797620963615

Cited by 24 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…In line with this anecdotal evidence, research has found that humans actively engage in non-instrumental information-seeking van Lieshout et al, 2021), even if it requires a small cost (Bennett et al, 2016;Brydevall et al, 2018;Kang et al, 2009;Kobayashi & Hsu, 2019;Marvin & Shohamy, 2016;van Lieshout et al, 2018), involves taking the risk of receiving an electric shock (Lau et al, 2020), or leads to experiencing negative emotions like regret (FitzGibbon et al, 2021). These observations have led researchers to propose that information is a reward (FitzGibbon et al, 2020;Marvin & Shohamy, 2016), functioning like extrinsic rewards (e.g., food or money) to govern our .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Broad Brain Networks Support Curiosity-Motivated Incidental Learning Of Naturalistic Dynamic Stimuli With And Without Monetary Incentives

Meliß¹,

Reekum²,

Murayama³

2022

Preprint

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Curiosity - the intrinsic desire to know - is a concept central to the human mind and knowledge acquisition. Experimental studies on information-seeking have found that curiosity facilitates memory encoding and exhibits similar reward,ng properties as extrinsic rewards/incentives by eliciting a dopaminergic response. However, it is not clear whether these findings hold with more naturalistic dynamic stimuli and how the joint effect of curiosity and extrinsic incentive manifests in learning and neural activation patterns. Herein, we presented participants with videos of magic tricks across two behavioural (N1 = 77, N2 = 78) and one fMRI study (N = 50) and asked them to rate subjective feelings of curiosity, while also performing a judgement task that was incentivised for the half of participants. Incidental memory for the magic trick was tested a week later. The integrated results showed that both curiosity and availability of extrinsic incentives enhanced encoding but did not interact with each other. However, exploratory analyses showed that curiosity and monetary incentives were associated with recollection and familiarity differently, suggesting the involvement of different encoding mechanisms. Analysis of the fMRI data using the intersubject synchronisation framework showed that, while the effects of curiosity on memory were located in the hippocampus and dopaminergic brain areas, neither the effects of curiosity nor incentives themselves were found in the often-implicated reward network, but instead were associated with cortical areas involved in processing uncertainly and attention. These results suggest that curiosity recruits broader brain networks than what was implicated in the previous literature when investigated with dynamic stimuli.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Broad Brain Networks Support Curiosity-Motivated Incidental Learning Of Naturalistic Dynamic Stimuli With And Without Monetary Incentives

Meliß¹,

Reekum²,

Murayama³

2022

Preprint

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“…Counterfactual curiosity can be defined as motivation to seek out counterfactual information-information about what might have been had past events been different [5][6][7]. Recent research suggests that such motivation is observed after decision making in human adults and children, as well as rhesus monkeys [5][6][7]. There are two types of evidence that counterfactual information has a motivational lure-spontaneous counterfactual thoughts and seeking of counterfactual information.…”

Section: Evidence For Counterfactual Curiositymentioning

confidence: 99%

Counterfactual curiosity: motivated thinking about what might have been

FitzGibbon

Murayama

2022

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Counterfactual information, information about what might have been, forms the content of counterfactual thoughts and emotions like regret and relief. Recent research suggests that human adults and children, as well as rhesus monkeys, demonstrate ‘counterfactual curiosity’: they are motivated to seek out counterfactual information after making decisions. Based on contemporary theories of curiosity and information seeking and a broad range of empirical literature, we suggest multiple heterogeneous psychological processes that contribute to people's motivation for counterfactual information. This includes processes that are identified in the curiosity literature more generally—the potential use of counterfactual information for adaptive decision making (its long-term instrumental value) and the drive to reduce uncertainty. Additionally, we suggest that counterfactual information may be particularly alluring because of its role in causal reasoning; its relationship with prediction and decision making; and its potential to fulfil emotion regulation and self-serving goals. Some future directions have been suggested, including investigating the role of individual differences in counterfactual curiosity on learning and wellbeing. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny’.

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“…Analogous to sex drive, curiosity can dissipate if people are distracted, and lack of satiation does not cause death (Shin & Kim, 2019). Like other drives, curiosity may not be rational; potentially driving people to seek information with negative consequences (FitzGibbon et al, 2021).…”

Section: Curiositymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…FitzGibbon et al (2020) argue that incentive-salience is a purely motivational urge, accounting for the seductive lure of curiosity, i.e. the desire to irrationally seek information with negative consequences (FitzGibbon et al, 2021;Hsee & Ruan, 2016;Oosterwijk, 2017).…”

Section: Incentive Saliencementioning

confidence: 99%

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How Are Curiosity and Interest Different? Naïve Bayes Classification of People’s Beliefs

et al. 2021

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Researchers studying curiosity and interest note a lack of consensus in whether and how these important motivations for learning are distinct. Empirical attempts to distinguish them are impeded by this lack of conceptual clarity. Following a recent proposal that curiosity and interest are folk concepts, we sought to determine a non-expert consensus view on their distinction using machine learning methods. In Study 1, we demonstrate that there is a consensus in how they are distinguished, by training a Naïve Bayes classification algorithm to distinguish between free-text definitions of curiosity and interest (n = 396 definitions) and using cross-validation to test the classifier on two sets of data (main n = 196; additional n = 218). In Study 2, we demonstrate that the non-expert consensus is shared by experts and can plausibly underscore future empirical work, as the classifier accurately distinguished definitions provided by experts who study curiosity and interest (n = 92). Our results suggest a shared consensus on the distinction between curiosity and interest, providing a basis for much-needed conceptual clarity facilitating future empirical work. This consensus distinguishes curiosity as more active information seeking directed towards specific and previously unknown information. In contrast, interest is more pleasurable, in-depth, less momentary information seeking towards information in domains where people already have knowledge. However, we note that there are similarities between the concepts, as they are both motivating, involve feelings of wanting, and relate to knowledge acquisition.

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The Lure of Counterfactual Curiosity: People Incur a Cost to Experience Regret

Cited by 24 publications

References 47 publications

Broad Brain Networks Support Curiosity-Motivated Incidental Learning Of Naturalistic Dynamic Stimuli With And Without Monetary Incentives

Broad Brain Networks Support Curiosity-Motivated Incidental Learning Of Naturalistic Dynamic Stimuli With And Without Monetary Incentives

Counterfactual curiosity: motivated thinking about what might have been

How Are Curiosity and Interest Different? Naïve Bayes Classification of People’s Beliefs

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