Information seeking

When engaged with a specific task, humans and other animals occasionally make seemingly irrational decisions known as "lapses", even in static and well-learned environments. Given they serve no obvious reward-maximizing purpose, these choices are commonly attributed to disengagement, distraction or sensorimotor noise. However, "lapses" could also be related to a decision-makers' own, hidden objectives. We know, for example, that exploratory objectives can better account for lapses than undirected noise in certain models. Critically, however, there are multiple mechanisms for exploration and we

Over the last decade, research on curiosity – the desire to seek new information – has been rapidly growing. Several studies have shown that curiosity elicits activity within the dopaminergic circuit and thereby enhances hippocampus-dependent learning. However, given this new field of research, we do not have a good understanding yet of (i) how curiosity-based learning changes across the lifespan, (ii) why some people show better learning improvements due to curiosity than others, and (iii) whether lab-based research on curiosity translates to how curiosity affects information seeking in real

…Therefore, the desire to acquire information may be an innate motivational drive. We have developed a task in mice to study the neural mechanisms that compute the value of informative stimuli that drive information seeking. Mice are provided with odor cues in a center port that dictate entry into one of two side ports. The side ports offer water reward with identical probability and differ only in whether they provide an information odor cue that reveals the reward outcome. We

…are often strongly motivated to seek information about uncertain future rewards. Remarkably, they prefer information even when it has no objective value for controlling the outcome, suggesting that information has subjective value of its own. In recent years there has been an explosion of research on information seeking in humans and animal models. However, a critical unanswered question is whether the computations that assign subjective value to information are conserved between humans and other species. If so, we could

Recent years have seen a considerable surge of research on interest-based engagement, examining how and why people are engaged in activities without relying on extrinsic rewards. However, the field of inquiry has been somewhat segregated into three different research traditions which have been developed relatively independently --- research on curiosity, interest, and trait curiosity/interest. The current talk sets out an integrative perspective; the reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition. This conceptual framework takes on the basic premise of existing reward-learning models of in

Animals are motivated to acquire knowledge. A particularly striking example is information seeking behavior: animals often seek out sensory cues that will inform them about the properties of uncertain future rewards, even when there is no way for them to use this information to influence the reward outcome, and even when this information comes at a considerable cost. Evidence from monkey electrophysiology and human fMRI studies suggests that orbitofrontal cortex and midbrain dopamine neurons represent the subjective value of knowledge during information seeking behavior. However, it remains un