Abstract
Curiosity is pervasive in our everyday lives, but we know little about the factors that contribute to this drive. In the current study, we assessed whether curiosity about uncertain outcomes is modulated by the valence of the information, i.e. whether the information is good or bad news. Using a lottery task in which outcome uncertainty, expected value and outcome valence (gain versus loss) were manipulated independently, we found that curiosity is overall higher for gains compared with losses and that curiosity increased with increasing outcome uncertainty for both gains and losses. These effects of uncertainty and valence did not interact, indicating that the motivation to reduce uncertainty and the motivation to maximize positive information represent separate, independent drives.
Highlights
Curiosity is a strong driver of behaviour, but relatively little is known about its psychological and neurobiological mechanisms [1]
We investigated whether there was a relationship between the main effects of outcome valence, outcome uncertainty, expected value and the curiosity ratings (Experiment 1A, 1B and 1C) or willingness to wait decisions (Experiment 2)
Curiosity monotonically increased with increasing outcome uncertainty, which was not modulated by gain/loss outcome valence
Summary
Curiosity is a strong driver of behaviour, but relatively little is known about its psychological and neurobiological mechanisms [1] It is often defined as a motivational state that stimulates exploration and information seeking to reduce uncertainty [1,2,3,4]. Obtaining this information can be useful to increase rewards or to make better decisions, for example when we check the stock market to see if we should make a new investment. Think for example about situations in which we scroll through our Instagram feed without a specific purpose This type of curiosity is referred to as “non-instrumental curiosity” (see [1])
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