The seductive lure of curiosity: information as a motivationally salient reward

Fitzgibbon, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8563-391X, Lau, J. K. L. and Murayama, K. (2020) The seductive lure of curiosity: information as a motivationally salient reward. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 35. pp. 21-27. ISSN 2352-1546 doi: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.05.014

Abstract/Summary

Humans are known to seek non-instrumental information, sometimes expending considerable effort or taking risks to receive it, e.g. “curiosity killed the cat”. This suggests that information is highly motivationally salient. In the current article, we first review recent empirical studies that demonstrated the strong motivational lure of curiosity – people will pay and risk electric shocks for non-instrumental information; and request information that has negative emotional consequences. Then we suggest that this seductive lure of curiosity may reflect a motivational mechanism that has been discussed in the literature of reward learning: incentive salience. We present behavioral and neuroscientific evidence in support of this idea and propose two areas requiring further investigation – how incentive salience for information is instigated; and individual differences in motivational vigor.