The Hunger for Knowledge: Neural Correlates of Curiosity

Curiosity, which has been described as a ‘hunger for knowledge’, plays a critical role in the acquisition of information, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We explored the neural correlates of curiosity by scanning subjects with fMRI while they read trivia questions which create a mixture of high and low curiosity. We tested one implication of out initial findings in a follow-up study in which we measured subjects’ pupil dilation and tested memory recall. When subjects are more curious, there is more activity in caudate regions known to be involved in anticipated reward, and their pupils dilate more just before receiving answers. Both effects are consistent with the hypothesis that curiosity reflects a hunger for information. Our fMRI results also showed that curiosity increases activity in memory areas such as parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) and left inferior frontal gyrus (left IFG) when subjects guess incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance memory for new information. This prediction about memory enhancement is borne out in the second study which demonstrated that higher curiosity in the initial session is correlated with better recall of answers, in support of the initial implication that curiosity improves learning.