Curiosity, information demand and attentional priority

Gottlieb, Jacqueline; Cohanpour, Michael; Li, Yvonne; Singletary, Nicholas M.; Zabeh, Erfan

doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.07.016

Cited by 46 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Similarly, a single unit recording study by White et al (2019) identified dACC as the leading node in a network of areas that encoded gaze shifts to resolve uncertainty about upcoming rewards, and further studies have shown that activity in this area predicts ‘checking’ behaviours when monkeys are close to receiving a reward ( Stoll et al, 2016 ). Collectively, this work is consistent with a role for this region in driving information sampling to resolve uncertainty ( Monosov, 2020 ), which in turn gives rise to shifts in visual fixation and spatial attention ( Krauzlis et al, 2014 ; Gottlieb et al, 2020 ).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Medial Frontal Cortex Activity Predicts Information Sampling in Economic Choice

et al. 2021

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Decision-making not only requires agents to decide what to choose, but also how much information to sample before committing to a choice. Previously established frameworks for economic choice argue for a deliberative process of evidence accumulation across time. These tacitly acknowledge a role of information sampling, in that decisions are only made once sufficient evidence is acquired, yet few experiments have explicitly placed information sampling under the participant’s control. Here, we use functional MRI to investigate the neural basis of information sampling in economic choice, by allowing participants (n=30, sex not recorded) to actively sample information in a multi-step decision task. We show that medial frontal cortex (MFC) activity is predictive of further information sampling prior to choice. Choice difficulty (inverse value difference, keeping sensory difficulty constant) was also encoded in MFC, but this effect was explained away by the inclusion of information sampling as a co-regressor in the general linear model. A distributed network of regions across prefrontal cortex encoded key features of the sampled information at the time it was presented. We propose that MFC is an important controller of the extent to which information is gathered before committing to an economic choice. This role may explain why MFC activity has been associated with evidence accumulation in previous studies, in which information sampling was an implicit rather than explicit feature of the decision.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Medial Frontal Cortex Activity Predicts Information Sampling in Economic Choice

et al. 2021

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“…Our results have important theoretical implications, demonstrating a link between value and curiosity and thereby supporting recent accounts of curiosity that explicitly link curiosity to value (Dubey & Griffiths, 2020;Liquin & Lombrozo, 2020b), and challenging accounts of curiosity, such as the incongruity theory (Berlyne, 1960) and the information-gap theory (Loewenstein, 1994), insofar as those theories fail to incorporate a defined role for value. Even though curiosity is affected by instrumental value, we endorse an insight from prior work: that curiosity is typically experienced as an intrinsic and non-instrumental drive (see also Liquin & Lombrozo, INCREASING PERCEIVED USEFULNESS STIMULATES CURIOSITY 13 2020a; Gottlieb et al, 2020;Sharot & Sunstein, 2020). This could make interventions on curiosity especially powerful in fostering information-seeking in educational contexts.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

If it’s important, then I’m curious: Increasing perceived usefulness stimulates curiosity

Dubey¹,

Griffiths²,

Lombrozo³

2020

Preprint

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Curiosity is considered essential for learning and sustained engagement, yet stimulating curiosity in educational contexts remains a challenge. Can people's curiosity about a topic be stimulated by evidence that the topic has potential value? In two experiments we show that increasing perceptions of value regarding a scientific topic also increases curiosity and subsequent information search. Our results also show that simply presenting interesting facts is not enough to influence curiosity, and that people are more likely to be curious about a topic if they perceive it to be directly valuable to them. Given the link between curiosity and learning, these results have important implications for science communication and education more broadly.

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“…These findings are consistent with an emerging new perspective that frames decision-making as a process of active information search rather than simply the passive accumulation of reward estimates (Hunt, 2021). This view not only bridges decision-making with active informationsampling (Boldt, Blundell, & De Martino, 2019;Cohen, McClure, & Yu, 2007;Gottlieb, 2018;Gottlieb, Cohanpour, Li, Singletary, & Zabeh, 2020;Gottlieb & Oudeyer, 2018;Hunt et al, 2018;Hunt, Rutledge, Malalasekera, Kennerley, & Dolan, 2016;Kaanders, Nili, O'Reilly, & Hunt, 2020), extended behaviors (Callaway, van Opheusden, et al, 2021;Holroyd & Yeung, 2012), and learning (Behrens, Woolrich, Walton, & Rushworth, 2007;Frömer et al, 2020;Nassar et al, 2012;O'Reilly, 2013), it also renders decision-making fundamentally a control problem. A group of recently proposed process models puts information search -rather than value comparison -at the core of the decision process (Callaway, Rangel, & Griffiths, 2021;Jang, Sharma, & Drugowitsch, 2021).…”

Section: Controlling the Flow Of Informationsupporting

confidence: 81%

Filling the gaps: Cognitive control as a critical lens for understanding mechanisms of value-based decision-making

Frömer¹,

Shenhav²

2021

Preprint

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Research into value-based decision making has made tremendous progress in identifying behavioral and neural correlates of choice value. However, these correlates have been primarily viewed through a field-specific lens, focusing on how they contribute to the evaluation and selection between options to arrive at a choice. Here, we reveal blind-spots resulting from this limited perspective, and how they can be filled in through taking the perspective of cognitive control. We highlight three particular insights that this perspective offers: (1) a view towards the goal-relevance of one’s options and their features; (2) a view of decision-making correlates as a proxy for monitoring to determine control adjustments; (3) a view of those correlates as a proxy for monitoring that extends temporally and hierarchically beyond the immediate choice task. We show how adopting these complementary perspectives offers new insight into the determinants of both decisions and control; alternative interpretations for common findings in the neuroeconomic literature; and fruitful directions for future research.

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Curiosity, information demand and attentional priority

Cited by 46 publications

References 50 publications

Medial Frontal Cortex Activity Predicts Information Sampling in Economic Choice

Medial Frontal Cortex Activity Predicts Information Sampling in Economic Choice

If it’s important, then I’m curious: Increasing perceived usefulness stimulates curiosity

Filling the gaps: Cognitive control as a critical lens for understanding mechanisms of value-based decision-making

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