Choosing to view morbid information involves reward circuitry

Neural mechanisms of information seeking

We ubiquitously seek information to make better decisions. Particularly in the modern age, when more information is available at our fingertips than ever, the information we choose to collect determines the quality of our decisions. Decision neuroscience has long adopted empirical approaches where the information available to decision-makers is fully controlled by the researchers, leaving neural mechanisms of information seeking less understood. Although information seeking has long been studied in the context of the exploration-exploitation trade-off, recent studies have widened the scope to investigate more overt information seeking in a way distinct from other decision processes. Insights gained from these studies, accumulated over the last few years, raise the possibility that information seeking is driven by the reward system signaling the subjective value of information. In this piece, we review findings from the recent studies, highlighting the conceptual and empirical relationships between distinct literatures, and discuss future research directions necessary to establish a more comprehensive understanding of how individuals seek information as a part of value-based decision-making.

Curiosity Satisfaction Increases Event-related Potentials Sensitive to Reward

Successful learning depends on various factors such as depth of processing, motivation, or curiosity about information. A strong drive to learn something or the expectation of receiving a reward can be crucial to enhance learning. However, the influence of curiosity on the processing of new information and its similarity with reward processing is not well understood. This study examined whether states of curiosity influence specific ERPs associated with reward processing and whether these ERPs are related with later memory benefits. In an initial screening phase, participants indicated their curiosity and confidence in prior knowledge about answers to various trivia questions. In a subsequent study phase, we targeted different time windows related to reward processing during the presentation of trivia answers containing the reward positivity (RewP; 250-350 msec), the P3 (250-500 msec), and the late-positive-potential (LPP; 600-1000 msec). In a following surprise memory test, we found that participants recalled more high- than low-curiosity answers. The RewP, P3, and LPP showed greater positive mean amplitudes for high compared with low curiosity, reflecting increased reward processing. In addition, we found that the RewP and the P3 showed more positive mean amplitudes for later recalled compared with later forgotten answers, but curiosity did not modulate this encoding-related results. These findings support the view that the satisfaction of curiosity resembles reward processing, indicated by ERPs.

Uncertainty drives exploration of negative information across younger and older adults

Although individuals generally avoid negative information, recent research documents that they voluntarily explore negative information to resolve uncertainty. However, it remains unclear (a) whether uncertainty facilitates exploration similarly when exploration is expected to lead to negative, neutral, or positive information, and (b) whether older adults seek negative information to reduce uncertainty like younger adults do. This study addresses the two issues across four experimental studies (N = 407). The results indicate that individuals are more likely to expose themselves to negative information when uncertainty is high. In contrast, when information was expected to be neutral or positive, the uncertainty surrounding it did not significantly alter individuals' exploration behavior. Furthermore, we found that uncertainty increased the exploration of negative information in both older and younger adults. In addition, both younger and older adults chose to explore negative information to reduce uncertainty, even when there were positive or neutral alternatives. In contrast to the age-related similarities in these behavioral measures, older adults demonstrated reduced scores in questionnaires on sensation seeking and curiosity, relative to their counterparts who were younger. These results suggest that information uncertainty has a selective facilitation effect on exploration for negative information and that normal aging does not alter this tendency, despite age-related reductions in self-reported measures of personality traits relevant to information seeking.

A multivariate brain signature for reward

The processing of reinforcers and punishers is crucial to adapt to an ever changing environment and its dysregulation is prevalent in mental health and substance use disorders. While many human brain measures related to reward have been based on activity in individual brain regions, recent studies indicate that many affective and motivational processes are encoded in distributed systems that span multiple regions. Consequently, decoding these processes using individual regions yields small effect sizes and limited reliability, whereas predictive models based on distributed patterns yield larger effect sizes and excellent reliability. To create such a predictive model for the processes of rewards and losses, termed the Brain Reward Signature (BRS), we trained a model to predict the signed magnitude of monetary rewards on the Monetary Incentive Delay task (MID; N = 39) and achieved a highly significant decoding performance (92% for decoding rewards versus losses). We subsequently demonstrate the generalizability of our signature on another version of the MID in a different sample (92% decoding accuracy; N = 12) and on a gambling task from a large sample (73% decoding accuracy, N = 1084). We further provided preliminary data to characterize the specificity of the signature by illustrating that the signature map generates estimates that significantly differ between rewarding and negative feedback (92% decoding accuracy) but do not differ for conditions that differ in disgust rather than reward in a novel Disgust-Delay Task (N = 39). Finally, we show that passively viewing positive and negatively valenced facial expressions loads positively on our signature, in line with previous studies on morbid curiosity. We thus created a BRS that can accurately predict brain responses to rewards and losses in active decision making tasks, and that possibly relates to information seeking in passive observational tasks.

Curiosity and mesolimbic functional connectivity drive information seeking in real life

Curiosity reflects an individual's intrinsic motivation to seek information in order to close information gaps. In laboratory-based experiments, both curiosity and information seeking have been associated with enhanced neural dynamics in the mesolimbic dopaminergic circuit. However, it is unclear whether curiosity and dopaminergic dynamics drive information seeking in real life. We investigated (i) whether curiosity predicts different characteristics of real-life information seeking and (ii) whether functional connectivity within the mesolimbic dopaminergic circuit is associated with information seeking outside the laboratory. Up to 15 months before the COVID-19 pandemic, curiosity and anxiety questionnaires and a 10-minute resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging session were conducted. In a follow-up survey early during the COVID-19 pandemic, participants repeated the questionnaires and completed an additional questionnaire about their COVID-19-related information seeking. Individual differences in curiosity but not anxiety were positively associated with the frequency of information-seeking behaviour. Additionally, the frequency of information seeking was predicted by individual differences in resting-state functional connectivity between the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens. The present translational study paves the way for future studies on the role of curiosity in real-life information seeking by showing that both curiosity and the mesolimbic dopaminergic functional network support real-life information-seeking behaviour.

Motivations underlying self-infliction of pain during thinking for pleasure

Previous research suggested that people prefer to administer unpleasant electric shocks to themselves rather than being left alone with their thoughts because engagement in thinking is an unpleasant activity. The present research examined this negative reinforcement hypothesis by giving participants a choice of distracting themselves with the generation of electric shock causing no to intense pain. Four experiments (N = 254) replicated the result that a large proportion of participants opted to administer painful shocks to themselves during the thinking period. However, they administered strong electric shocks to themselves even when an innocuous response option generating no or a mild shock was available. Furthermore, participants inflicted pain to themselves when they were assisted in the generation of pleasant thoughts during the waiting period, with no difference between pleasant versus unpleasant thought conditions. Overall, these results question that the primary motivation for the self-administration of painful shocks is avoidance of thinking. Instead, it seems that the self-infliction of pain was attractive for many participants, because they were curious about the shocks, their intensities, and the effects they would have on them.

Interactions between ventrolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex during learning and behavioural change

Hypotheses and beliefs guide credit assignment - the process of determining which previous events or actions caused an outcome. Adaptive hypothesis formation and testing are crucial in uncertain and changing environments in which associations and meanings are volatile. Despite primates' abilities to form and test hypotheses, establishing what is causally responsible for the occurrence of particular outcomes remains a fundamental challenge for credit assignment and learning. Hypotheses about what surprises are due to stochasticity inherent in an environment as opposed to real, systematic changes are necessary for identifying the environment's predictive features, but are often hard to test. We review evidence that two highly interconnected frontal cortical regions, anterior cingulate cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal area 47/12o, provide a biological substrate for linking two crucial components of hypothesis-formation and testing: the control of information seeking and credit assignment. Neuroimaging, targeted disruptions, and neurophysiological studies link an anterior cingulate - 47/12o circuit to generation of exploratory behaviour, non-instrumental information seeking, and interpretation of subsequent feedback in the service of credit assignment. Our observations support the idea that information seeking and credit assignment are linked at the level of neural circuits and explain why this circuit is important for ensuring behaviour is flexible and adaptive.

Curiosity in childhood and adolescence - what can we learn from the brain

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Curiosity enhances memory via the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and ventral striatum.

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Development of curiosity and its effect on memory in childhood/adolescence not well understood.

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Maturation of curiosity-promoting brain functions might contribute to increasing benefits of curiosity for learning.

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Harnessing curiosity in education might need differential approaches across child development.

Accumulating evidence in adults has shown that curiosity and surprise enhance memory via activity in the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and dopaminergic areas. Based on findings of how these brain areas and their inter-connections develop during childhood and adolescence, we discuss how the effects of curiosity and surprise on memory may develop during childhood and adolescence. We predict that the maturation of brain areas potentially related to curiosity elicitation (hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex [ACC], prefrontal cortex) and protracted development of hippocampal-PFC and ACC-PFC connectivity lead to differential effects of curiosity and surprise on memory during childhood and adolescence. Our predictions are centred within the PACE (Prediction-Appraisal-Curiosity-Exploration) Framework which proposes multiple levels of analyses of how curiosity is elicited and enhances memory.

A prefrontal network integrates preferences for advance information about uncertain rewards and punishments

Humans and animals can be strongly motivated to seek information to resolve uncertainty about rewards and punishments. In particular, despite its clinical and societal relevance, very little is known about information seeking about punishments. We show that attitudes toward information about punishments and rewards are distinct and separable at both behavioral and neuronal levels. We demonstrate the existence of prefrontal neuronal populations that anticipate opportunities to gain information in a relatively valence-specific manner, separately anticipating information about either punishments or rewards. These neurons are located in anatomically interconnected subregions of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) in area 12o/47. Unlike ACC, vlPFC also contains a population of neurons that integrate attitudes toward both reward and punishment information, to encode the overall preference for information in a bivalent manner. This cortical network is well suited to mediate information seeking by integrating the desire to resolve uncertainty about multiple, distinct motivational outcomes.

The Amsterdam Open MRI Collection, a set of multimodal MRI datasets for individual difference analyses

We present the Amsterdam Open MRI Collection (AOMIC): three datasets with multimodal (3 T) MRI data including structural (T1-weighted), diffusion-weighted, and (resting-state and task-based) functional BOLD MRI data, as well as detailed demographics and psychometric variables from a large set of healthy participants (N = 928, N = 226, and N = 216). Notably, task-based fMRI was collected during various robust paradigms (targeting naturalistic vision, emotion perception, working memory, face perception, cognitive conflict and control, and response inhibition) for which extensively annotated event-files are available. For each dataset and data modality, we provide the data in both raw and preprocessed form (both compliant with the Brain Imaging Data Structure), which were subjected to extensive (automated and manual) quality control. All data is publicly available from the OpenNeuro data sharing platform.

Feeling-of-knowing experiences breed curiosity

A central tenet in theoretical work on metacognition is that retrieval experiences during memory search can exert control over behaviour. States of curiosity, which reflect motivational tendencies to seek out information, may play a critical role in this control function. We conducted two experiments to address this idea, focusing on links between feeling-of knowing (FOK) experiences, memory-search duration, and subsequent information-seeking behaviour. We administered an episodic FOK paradigm that probed memory for previously studied face-name pairs, and subsequently provided an opportunity to select limited pairs for restudy. This set-up allowed us to test whether current search duration and subsequent restudy choices are biased towards items with high FOK ratings. Results revealed a positive relationship between FOK ratings and the response times of these judgements. We observed a similar positive relationship between FOK ratings and subsequent item selection for restudy. Moreover, experimental manipulations of FOK ratings based on familiarity of the face cues also had parallel effects. Our findings suggest that metacognitive experiences during unsuccessful retrieval from episodic memory can induce states of curiosity that shape behaviour beyond the immediate retrieval context. Curiosity may act as a bond to ensure that memory gaps identified through unsuccessful retrieval adaptively guide future learning.

Enjoyment of watching pimple popping videos: An fMRI investigation

BACKGROUND

Millions of people enjoy watching videos of pimple treatments. The underlying neural mechanisms of this enjoyment have not been investigated so far.

METHOD

We administered a total of 96 video clips from three categories: Pimple Popping (PP), Water Fountains (WF), and Steam Cleaning (SC). The PP videos showed a pimple or blackhead that was opened to squeeze out the pus or sebum. The female participants (mean age: 24 years) were assigned to one of two groups: females who reported to enjoy watching PP (PPE_high; n = 38) and those with little enjoyment (PPE_low; n = 42). We analyzed brain activity in regions of interest (ROI) involved in the encoding of pleasure and aversion (e.g., nucleus accumbens (NAc), insula).

RESULTS

The PPE_high group showed less deactivation of the NAc (ROI finding), more frontopolar activation (whole-brain finding), and stronger accumbens-insula coupling than the PPE_low group.

CONCLUSIONS

A specific pattern of brain activity and connectivity that involves the NAc and insula (coding of aversion/pleasure) and the frontopolar region (prediction of outcomes of motor decisions) is associated with the enjoyment of PP videos.