Neural mechanisms underlying the induction and relief of perceptual curiosity

Abstract

Curiosity is one of the most basic biological drives in both animals and humans, and has been identified as a key motive for learning and discovery. Despite the importance of curiosity and related behaviors, the topic has been largely neglected in human neuroscience; hence little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying curiosity. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate what happens in our brain during the induction and subsequent relief of perceptual curiosity. Our core findings were that (1) the induction of perceptual curiosity, through the presentation of ambiguous visual input, activated the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brain regions sensitive to conflict and arousal; (2) the relief of perceptual curiosity, through visual disambiguation, activated regions of the striatum that have been related to reward processing; and (3) the relief of perceptual curiosity was associated with hippocampal activation and enhanced incidental memory. These findings provide the first demonstration of the neural basis of human perceptual curiosity. Our results provide neurobiological support for a classic psychological theory of curiosity, which holds that curiosity is an aversive condition of increased arousal whose termination is rewarding and facilitates memory.

Information-seeking, curiosity, and attention: computational and neural mechanisms

“…In psychology, research on curiosity surged during the 1960s and 1970s and subsequently waned (for a comprehensive review, see (Lowenstein 1994)), and shows a mild revival in neuroscience in recent years (Kang, Hsu et al 2009; Jepma, Verdonschot et al 2012). Our focus here is on evaluating recent developments related to this question from three lines of investigation that have remained largely separate – namely, studies of active learning and exploration in the machine learning and robotics fields, studies of eye movements in natural behavior, and studies of curiosity in psychology and neuroscience.…”

“…To explain such behaviors and the high degree of motivation associated with them, it seems necessary to assume that the brain generates intrinsic rewards related to learning or acquiring information (Berlyne 1960). Some support for this idea comes from the observation that the dopaminergic system, the brain’s chief reward system, is sensitive to intrinsic rewards (Redgrave, Gurney et al 2008), responds to anticipated information about rewards in monkeys (Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka 2009) and is activated by paradigms that induce curiosity in humans (Kang, Hsu et al 2009; Jepma, Verdonschot et al 2012). However, important questions remain about the nature of intrinsic rewards at what David Marr would call the computational, representational and physical levels of description (Marr 2010).…”

The Emerging Neuroscience of Intrinsic Motivation: A New Frontier in Self-Determination Research

“…Specifically, their study found participants who spent more free-choice time solving remote-associate word problems (i.e., a behavioral marker of intrinsic motivation) showed greater activity in the ACC, amygdala, anterior and posterior insula, PHG, and caudate nucleus after trial onsets that immediately followed negative feedback for preceding trials. Jepma et al (2012) examined the neural correlates of perceptual curiosity. Participants viewed blurry images of otherwise easily recognizable objects that induced feelings of curiosity, and were subsequently shown clear images of the objects to satisfy their curiosity.…”

Visual re-identification of individual objects: a core problem for organisms and AI

“…Picard (2013), for example, reports the transient occurrence of feelings of unquestionable certainty in the existence of God as an omnipotent designer of the universe, accompanied by intense positive affect, in a self-described atheist during a right-insular cortex seizure. Using blurred images as an uncertainty-inducing stimulus and fMRI to detect taskspecific activation, Jepma et al (2012) were able to directly demonstrate activation of both right anterior insular and bilateral anterior cingulate cortex in subjects who reported experiencing curiosity. Although Jepma et al (2012) interpreted the insular activation solely in terms of arousal, it is interesting to note that anterior insular cortex is broadly implicated in the integration of epistemic feelings and right anterior insular cortex is broadly implicated in the integration of aversive feelings in particular (e.g., Craig 2010), consistent with the use of a blurred-image paradigm in these experiments.…”