Abstract:Humans are immensely curious and motivated to reduce uncertainty. Inspired by studies of sensory uncertainty, we hypothesized that visual areas provide multivariate representations of uncertainty, which are read out by higher-order areas that encode confidence and, ultimately, translated into curiosity. During fMRI, participants rated their confidence in identifying distorted images of animals and objects and their curiosity to see the clear image. We found that curiosity peaked at low confidence. To link sens… Show more
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