Curiosity share common neural mechanisms with extrinsic incentives (i.e. hunger for foods): acceptance (compared to rejection) of curiosity/incentive-driven gambles was accompanied with an enhanced activity in the striatum

Hunger for Knowledge: How the Irresistible Lure of Curiosity is Generated in the Brain. Johnny King L Lau, Hiroki Ozono, Kei Kuratomi, Asuka Komiya, Kou Murayama. bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/473975

Abstract: Curiosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty. For example, a meta-analysis revealed that curiosity predicts academic performance above and beyond intelligence, corroborating findings that curiosity supported long-term consolidation of learning. However, curiosity may come at a cost of strong seductive power that sometimes puts people in a harmful situation. Here, with a set of three behavioural and two neuroimaging experiments including novel stimuli that strongly trigger curiosity (i.e. magic tricks), we examined the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the irresistible lure of curiosity. We consistently demonstrated that across different samples people were indeed willing to gamble to expose themselves to physical risks (i.e. electric shocks) in order to satisfy their curiosity for trivial knowledge that carries no apparent instrumental values. Also, underlying this seductive power of curiosity is its incentive salience properties, which share common neural mechanisms with extrinsic incentives (i.e. hunger for foods). In particular, the two independent fMRI experiments using different kinds of curiosity-stimulating stimuli found replicable results that acceptance (compared to rejection) of curiosity/incentive-driven gambles was accompanied with an enhanced activity in the striatum.