Curiosity has been described as the "wick in the candle of learning" but its underlying mechanisms are not well-understood. We scanned subjects with fMRI while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions is correlated with activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in anticipated reward or encoding prediction error. This finding led to a behavioral study showing that subjects spend more scarce resources (either limited tokens, or waiting time) to find out answers when they are more curious. The fMRI also showed that curiosity increases activity in memory areas when subjects guess incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory enhancement is confirmed in a behavioral study-higher curiosity in the initial session is correlated with better recall of surprising answers 10 days later.Keywords: Neuroimaging, Memory, Learning, Brain 2 Curiosity is the complex feeling and cognition accompanying the desire to learn what is unknown. Curiosity can be both helpful and dangerous. It plays a critical role in motivating learning and discovery, especially by creative professionals, increasing the world's store of knowledge. Einstein, for example, once said, "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious (Hoffmann, 1972)." The dangerous side of curiosity is its association with exploratory behaviors with harmful consequences. An ancient example is the mythical Pandora, who opened a box that unleashed misfortunes on the world. In modern times, technology such as the Internet augments both good and bad effects of curiosity, by putting both enormous amounts of information and potentially dangerous social encounters a mouse click away.Despite its importance, the psychological and neural underpinnings of human curiosity remain poorly understood. Philosophers and psychologists have described curiosity as an appetite for knowledge, a drive like hunger and thirst (Loewenstein, 1994), the hunger pang of an 'info-vore' (Biederman & Vessel, 2006), and "the wick in the candle of learning" (William Arthur Ward). In reinforcement learning a "novelty bonus" is used to motivate the choice of unexplored strategies (Kakade & Dayan, 2002).Curiosity can be thought of as the psychological manifestation of such a novelty bonus.A theory guiding our research holds that curiosity arises from an incongruity or 'information gap'-a discrepancy between what one knows and what one wants to know (Loewenstein, 1994). The theory assumes that the aspired level of knowledge increases sharply with a small increase in knowledge, so that the information gap grows with initial learning. When one is sufficiently knowledgeable, however, the gap shrinks and curiosity falls. If curiosity is like a hunger for knowledge, then a small "priming dose" of information increases the hunger, and the decrease in curiosity from knowing a lot is like being satiated by information.In the information-gap theory, the object of curiosity is a...

Curiosity has been described as the "wick in the candle of learning" but its underlying mechanisms are not well-understood. We scanned subjects with fMRI while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions is correlated with activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in anticipated reward or encoding prediction error. This finding led to a behavioral study showing that subjects spend more scarce resources (either limited tokens, or waiting time) to find out answers when they are more curious. The fMRI also showed that curiosity increases activity in memory areas when subjects guess incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory enhancement is confirmed in a behavioral study-higher curiosity in the initial session is correlated with better recall of surprising answers 10 days later.

We conduct laboratory experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for biased transmission (such as security analysts painting a rosy picture about earnings prospects). Our results confirm earlier experimental findings of "overcommunication"-messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium theory. Furthermore, we used eyetracking to show that senders look much less at receiver payoffs compared to their own payoffs. At the same time, the senders' pupils dilate when they send deceptive messages, and dilate more when the deception is larger in magnitude. Together, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that figuring out how much to deceive another player is cognitively difficult.Using a combination of sender messages, lookup patterns, and pupil dilation, we can predict the true state about twice as often as predicted by equilibrium.Using these measures would enable receiver subjects to earn 6-8 percent more than they actually do.

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We report results from an exploratory study using eye‐tracking recording of information acquisition by players in a game theoretic learning paradigm. Eye‐tracking is used to observe what information subjects look at in 4times4 normal‐form games; the eye‐tracking results favor sophisticated learning over adaptive learning and lend support to anticipatory or sophisticated models of learning in which subjects look at payoffs of other players to anticipate what those players might do. The decision data, however, are poorly fit by the simple anticipatory models we examine. We discuss how eye‐tracking studies of information acquisition can fit into research agenda seeking to understand complex strategic behavior and consider methodological issues that must be addressed in order to maximize their potential.