The Wick in the Candle of Learning: Epistemic Curiosity Activates Reward Circuitry and Enhances Memory

“The two sessions in Experiment 2 were conducted and analyzed in Matlab (Mathworks, Inc., Natick, MA) using the Psychophysics Toolbox (Brainard, 1997) and the Eyelink Toolbox (Cornelissen, Peters, & Palmer, 2002).”

“A reward is an object or event that elicits approach and is worked for (Wise, 2004).”

“Philosophers and psychologists have described curiosity as an appetite for knowledge, a drive like hunger and thirst (Loewenstein, 1994), the hunger pang of an ‘‘info-vore’’ (Biederman & Vessel, 2006, p. 247), and ‘‘the wick in the candle of learning’’ (William Arthur Ward, cited by Wikiquote,…”

“Because pupil dilation is known to be linked to arousal, attention, interest, and cognitive effort (Beatty, 1982; Hess & Polt, 1960), and because anticipatory pupillary responses increase following a stimulus that predicts rewards (O’Doherty, Dayan, Friston, Critchley, & Dolan, 2003), the observed…”

“, unexpected changes or violated expectations [24]), conflicting (i.”

“…is also related to measures such as willingness to pay and a desire to seek out information, both of which have previously been associated with increased activation in the CPu (De Martino, Kumaran, Holt, & Dolan, 2009; Kang et al., 2009; Plassmann, OʼDoherty, & Rangel, 2007; Weber et al., 2007).”

“Our findings show that avoidance motivation, like other forms of motivation (Adcock et al, 2006; Callan and Schweighofer, 2008; Kang et al., 2009; Murayama and Kuhbandner, 2011), canenhancedeclarativememory.”

“[15] described the ‘information gap’ proposal as postulating ‘that the aspired-to level of knowledge increases sharply with a small increase in knowledge, so that the information gap grows with initial learning.”

“Indeed epistemic curiosity activates reward circuitry and enhances memory [22].”

“Now, the diversity of the world correspondingly stimulates curiosity (Mischel et al. 1972; Kang et al. 2009; Baumeister and Tierney 2011).”

“…curiosity leads to a desire for and an anticipation of reward (Kang et al. 2009; Wang and Huang 2018; Wiggin, Reimann, and Jain 2019), which implies that people expect to receive a reward – at minimum, the information about which they were curious (eg Kang et al. 2009; Marvin and Shohamy 2016).”

“Meanwhile, adults care about the answers to otherwise useless trivia questions (Kang et al., 2009).”

“Moreover, neuroimaging studies have shown that when a state of doubt or the perplexing nature of seeing an incongruent object activates curiosity, areas of the brain’s reward center are active during both the arousal (Kang et al. 2009) and the satiation (Jepma et al. 2012) of curiosity.”

“In Study 3a, we use a new set of ELI5 questions, and contrast these questions with fact-seeking trivia questions used in prior work (Dubey & Griffiths, 2017, 2019; Kang et al., 2009). In Study 3b, we use explanationseeking and fact-seeking questions posted as comments in response to captioned images in an on-line foru…”

“Curiosity-driven memory benefits correlated with anticipatory activity in midbrain and hippocampus [19 ] and when the answer to trivia questions was revealed, activations were found in structures associated with learning and memory, such as the parahippocampal gyrus and hippocampus [20].”

“Kang et al. (2009) used brain imaging to scan participants while they studied trivia questions.”

“Indeed, Kang et al. (2009) link curiosity to pupil dilation, which is a well-known, reliable measure of attention (Kahneman, 1973).”

“Additional ways to assess information avoidance include assessing how much money people will pay to avoid learning information (e.g., Charpentier et al., 2018; Kang et al., 2009; Swann & Read, 1981) and asking participants to report on past avoidance behavior (e.g., Bar-bour et al., 2012).”

“…to the U-shape relation that is often found between human curiosity and uncertainty (i.e., a preference for intermediate levels of uncertainty or complexity) [4,30,61]: by maximizing learning progress, an agent will incidentally end up in environments that are neither too simple nor too complex.”

“…to their work (e.g., Baranes et al. 2015; Boykin and Harackiewicz 1981; Eren 2009; Halamish et al. 2019; Hardy et al. 2017; Jirout and Klahr 2012; Kang et al. 2009; Korpershoek et al. 2018; Ligneul et al. 2018; Litman 2008; Litman and Spielberger 2003; Lowry and Johnson 1981; Reio Jr et al.…”

“…2019) Kang et al. reported activation in the striatum when participants anticipated the answer to a trivia question about which they were curious (Kang et al., 2009) Since then, several studies have reported activation in the midbrain and striatum during anticipation for information in different…”

“This is particularly true for state curiosity, which is tightly coupled with the expectation of resolution of a specific knowledge gap (Kang et al. 2009; Loewenstein 1994).”

“He argued that guessing enhanced curiosity about the topics and offered some evidence from subjects' self-reports that was consistent with this interpretation (cf. M. J. Kang et al., 2009).”

“…areas related to conflict and arousal, while resolving it activated areas related to reward (Jepma, Verdonschot, Van Steenbergen, Rombouts, & Nieuwenhuis, 2012; for related work see Gruber, Gelman, & Ranganath, 2014; Han et al., 2013; Kang et al., 2009; Maril, Simons, Weaver, & Schacter, 2005).”

“These studies have demonstrated that the more curious participants were about the trivia fact, the higher the likelihood that the answer would be later recalled (Kang et al., 2009; Gruber et al., 2014; Mullaney et al., 2014; McGillivray et al., 2015; Marvin & Shohamy, 2016).”

“Pupil dilation reflects cognitive involvement but also emotional processing (Jürgens, Fischer, & Schacht, 2018; Partala & Surraka, 2003), anticipation (Kang et al., 2009), pain (Chapman, Oka, Bradshaw, Jacobson, & Donaldson, 1999), and alertness (Beatty, 1982a).”

“Increase in pupil diameter (PD) has been found to be positively correlated with increased mental workload (Iqbal, Zheng, and Bailey 2004; Van Orden, Jung, and Makeig 2000; Van Orden et al. 2001), and heightened interest (Kang et al. 2009).”

“In addition, recent findings have proposed that the information that must be obtained to satisfy curiosity can be seen as a reward for which consumers are willing to expend considerable economic or time resources (e.g., Kang et al. 2009; Marvin and Shohamy 2016).”

“Similarly, participants’ endogenous curiosity for certain topics (e.g., facts about dinosaurs) has been shown to modulate the strength of explicit memories (Gruber, Gelman, & Ranganath, 2014; Kang et al., 2009).”

“…tegmental area, their afferents, ventral striatum, hippocampus, and their interconnections increased in proportion to the degree of curiosity, willingness to pay, and subsequent recall of content and incidental information present during trivia learning (Gruber et al., 2014; Kang et al., 2009).”

“Similarly, curiosity has been defined as the basic drive to learn, which sets the stage for development and learning ([6–8], but see [9]).”

“The neuroanatomy of curiosity is more complex and includes other areas such as hippocampal areas [12,43,44] and basal ganglia [33].”

“Even when it will not affect his decisions, the agent may wish to know his future income early to reduce anxiety (Wu, 1999; Epstein, 2008) or satisfy curiosity (Loewenstein, 1994; Kang et al., 2009).”

“The other half of the sample was used to test the model generalization ability, in order to guarantee the Figure 5 presents the contributions of the indicators used to detect learners’ reading ability, which would be built into the computational model as indicator weights. model fit.”

“In Kang et al. (2009), the pupillary response before seeing the answer to an interesting question could be attributed to either arousal due to anticipation of the answer, or pain due to the impatience waiting for the answer, but was interpreted as " anticipation of an interesting answer " because…”

“In turn, humans are better at learning information they are curious about (Gruber, Gelman & Ranganath, 2014; see also Kang et al., 2009).”

“Curiosity often has been referred to as the desire for new experiences and learning, or the appetite for acquiring new knowledge (Kang et al., 2009; Kidd & Hayden, 2015; Loewenstein, 1994; Shin & Kim, 2019).”

“Indeed, work in recent years has elaborated on what constitutes a reward—in addition to the obvious food and shelter (and their associated conditioned reinforcers) there seem to be other forms of reward that are perhaps similarly primary in nature [12].”

“striatum, inferior frontal gyrus, anterior insula, orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex) associated with regular curiosity [12,19 ,20,21], and the processing of extrinsic incentives and reward [22,23].”

“…have linked epistemic curiosity to both academic achievement itself (Kashdan & Yuen, 2007; Powell & Nettelbeck, 2014) and its correlates such as learning strategies (Richards, Litman, & Roberts, 2013), memory function (Kang et al., 2009), and intellectual-scientific interests (Mussel, 2013).”

“Finally, activation of the SNc/VTA and striatum in humans has been shown to be correlated with the degree to which human participants feel curious [62,70].”

“Under this model, intellectual curiosity was thought to emerge either when individuals were confronted with information that challenged their beliefs, attitudes, or knowledge, or when they identified a gap in their existing framework of knowledge (Kang et al., 2009; Loewenstein, 1994).”

“For example, functional neuroimaging confirms that learning the answers to trivia questions activates reward systems in a similar fashion to monetary or social rewards (Kang et al., 2009).”

“Other studies as well have reported a positive association between curiosity and memory for materials such as general knowledge questions (Kang et al., 2009), authors of famous quotations (Berlyne, 1966), short stories (Maw & Maw, 1961), and products in advertisements (Bull & Dizney, 1973).”

“Prior work on human curiosity has made use of a trivia questions paradigm [20, 26, 46], in which participants have to rate their curiosity about trivia questions.”

“For example, recent research investigating neural correlates of curiosity and early phases of interest may represent a step toward being able to discern when students become more or less engaged and interested in content (Kang et al., 2009; Hidi, 2015).”

“To examine the motivational systems that are recruited by curiosity, Kang et al. used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity in human observers who pondered trivia questions (Kang et al., 2009).”

“Such awe-inspiring images may create a sense of wonder and intellectual aspirations among the viewers (Anderson et al., 2020; Hadzigeorgiou et al., 2012; Kang et al., 2009; Urban, 2023).”

“…neuroscientific investigation has made progress in uncovering the physiological basis for many motivated processes that are relevant for education; motivation research may benefit from attending to the findings (see, e.g., Immordino-Yang et al., 2009, 2019; Kang et al., 2009; Murayama, 2019).”

“…the brain areas that respond to, anticipate, or evaluate reward in the ventral striatum, its dopaminergic innervation, or the orbital (OFC), anterior cingulate or parietal cortex (Schultz, 2004; Hsu et al., 2009; Kang et al., 2009; Kahnt et al., 2010; Louie et al., 2011; Soutschek et al., 2017).”

“…for the correlation between action skill and predictive saccades during action observation to be evidence that predictive saccades reflect recruitment of corresponding motor plans, one would need to demonstrate that it is specifically skill with the observed action that leads to this improvement.”