Topic: odor cues

Animals often seek knowledge of no apparent extrinsic value, suggesting that knowledge is a source of intrinsic value. 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

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