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The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity
Open accessAbstract
Curiosity is a basic element of our cognition, but its biological function, mechanisms, and neural underpinning remain poorly understood. It is nonetheless a motivator for learning, influential in decision-making, and crucial for healthy development. One factor limiting our understanding of it is the lack of a widely agreed upon delineation of what is and is not curiosity. Another factor is the dearth of standardized laboratory tasks that manipulate curiosity in the lab. Despite these barriers, recent years have seen a major growth of interest in both the neuroscience and psychology of curiosity. In this Perspective, we advocate for the importance of the field, provide a selective overview of its current state, and describe tasks that are used to study curiosity and information-seeking. We propose that, rather than worry about defining curiosity, it is more helpful to consider the motivations for information-seeking behavior and to study it in its ethological context.
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“Research has shown that because agents find pleasure in reducing manageable uncertainty, they are attracted to just-uncertain-enough environments”
From Active inference goes to school: the importance of active learning in the age of large language models (2024) · cites this paper as [50]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Kidd, C., & Hayden, B. Y.
- Affiliations
- University of Rochester (US)
- Corresponding author
- Hayden, Benjamin Y.
- Venue
- Neuron
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2015-11
- Volume
- 88
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 449-460
- ISSN
- 0896-6273 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4635443
- OpenAlex
- W2147130840
- Cited by
- 1,026
- References
- 136
- Citations by year
- 2026: 115 · 2025: 156 · 2024: 128 · 2023: 119 · 2022: 128 · 2021: 100 · 2020: 144 · 2019: 60 · 2018: 36 · 2017: 28 · 2016: 11
- FWCI
- 3.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Neuron (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA038615)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychological and Educational Research Studies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Creativity in Education and Neuroscience
- Keywords
- curiosity, information seeking, motivation, decision-making, student motivation, ethology
- MeSH terms
- Cognitive Neuroscience, Animals, Decision Making, Exploratory Behavior, Humans, Learning, Motivation
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