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Invited Symposium 1 - The cognitive neuroscience of curiosity and curiosity-driven learning

Chair: Matthias Gruber¹; ¹Cardiff University
Presenters: Matthias Gruber, Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, Saloni Krishnan, Anne Berry

Curiosity, the intrinsic motivation to acquire novel information, enhances learning and memory. Cognitive neuroscience has begun to identify the mechanisms behind this effect, implicating reward circuitry, neuromodulatory systems and the hippocampus. Yet most work has relied on a narrow set of paradigms in young adults, leaving open how these mechanisms generalize across learning domains and how they change across the lifespan. This symposium brings together four complementary approaches to these questions. Matthias Gruber will present the Prediction, Appraisal, Curiosity and Exploration (PACE) framework and neuroimaging evidence on how curiosity states engage dopaminergic and hippocampal circuits to support memory. Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells will examine curiosity across knowledge and music, combining pharmacological manipulation of the opioid system, electrophysiological recordings, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that directly compares music-evoked and knowledge-based curiosity. Saloni Krishnan will take a developmental perspective, presenting new data on curiosity and memory in neurodivergent children alongside neuroimaging work on intrinsic reward, with implications for language learning. Anne Berry will focus on the noradrenergic system, presenting 7 Tesla MRI of locus coeruleus connectivity gradients in young adults and linking locus coeruleus integrity to curiosity-driven information seeking in aging. Together, the talks span reward and neuromodulatory mechanisms, semantic, musical and linguistic domains, and development from childhood to older age. The symposium examines which features of curiosity-driven learning generalize across domains and which might be domain-specific, as well as how these processes are modulated by neurochemical systems and age.

Presentations

How curiosity enhances hippocampus-dependent memory via the dopaminergic circuit

Matthias Gruber¹; ¹Cardiff University

Curiosity reliably enhances learning and memory, but the mechanisms through which it translates into lasting knowledge are only beginning to be understood. In this talk, I will first outline the Prediction, Appraisal, Curiosity and Exploration (PACE) framework, which proposes that curiosity states, triggered by prediction errors and the appraisal of an information gap, engage dopaminergic circuits that enhance hippocampus-dependent memory. Building on our earlier functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) work using a trivia paradigm, I will then present three lines of evidence that test and extend this framework. First, using ultra-high-field 7 Tesla fMRI, we found that high-curiosity states engaged the ventral tegmental area and the subiculum, a key output region of the hippocampal formation, and that increased hippocampal pattern similarity during high-curiosity states predicted memory for incidental information. Second, in a resting-state fMRI study, functional connectivity between the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens predicted individual differences in curiosity-related memory enhancements, whereas connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex and the hippocampus predicted memory enhancements related to information prediction errors. Third, using a virtual environment, we showed that curiosity-driven exploration enhances spatial memory, suggesting that curiosity supports learning by shaping how people actively sample their environment. Together, these findings support a framework in which curiosity enhances memory through interacting dopaminergic and hippocampal pathways, and they raise open questions about how these mechanisms develop and generalize across learning domains.

Curiosity as a missing piece in music neuroscience: Insights from laboratory, pharmacological, and neuroimaging experiments

Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells¹; ¹ICREA-University of Barcelona

Within music neuroscience, curiosity has received far less attention than musical pleasure, despite its potential role in determining how listeners explore unfamiliar music, allocate resources to information seeking, and ultimately develop enduring musical interests. Here, we will present a series of studies examining how curiosity interacts with reward processing across behavioral, neurochemical, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging levels. Using a novel exploration–exploitation paradigm, we quantified the cost of musical curiosity by asking participants how much monetary reward they were willing to sacrifice to continue listening to unfamiliar music. Curiosity strongly biased exploration, especially when potential costs were at stake, and predicted better subsequent memory. In a double-blind pharmacological study, opioid-receptor blockade selectively reduced curiosity-driven costly exploration without altering subjective curiosity itself, revealing a dissociation between the experience of curiosity and its translation into information-seeking behavior. A second line of work examines the neural dynamics of curiosity. Using an adapted version of the trivia paradigm, we characterized anticipatory electrophysiological activity, focusing on slow frequency modulations preceding information delivery during high- versus low-curiosity states. In ongoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) work, we directly compare music-evoked and knowledge-based curiosity, using multivariate decoding to test whether common neural signatures generalize across informational domains. Overall, these findings enhance current knowledge of the motivational dynamics of curiosity in the aesthetic domain, and raise the question of whether curiosity is supported by common motivational processes across aesthetic and non-aesthetic domains or by partly domain-specific drives.

Does one size fit all? Individual differences in curiosity-driven learning

Saloni Krishnan¹; ¹University College London

Most of what we know about curiosity-driven learning largely comes from skilled, neurotypical adults. Intrinsic reward supports learning in at least two ways: a state of curiosity, triggered before information arrives, prepares the learner to encode it; and the information itself can be rewarding, generating a signal that strengthens memory. Both routes engage dopaminergic circuitry that modulates the hippocampus. But if information is hard to process, it may be effortful to act on curiosity, or less rewarding to find the answer. Here, I ask whether these routes are differently affected by a learner’s ability. I will show that acting on curiosity depends on ability and age: adults with dyslexia were as willing as controls to wait for information they were curious about, but in children, those with poorer language skills were less willing to wait for verbal information. In contrast, memory benefits of curiosity were broadly shared. The curiosity-memory boost was seen in adults with dyslexia and in children with language difficulties for both verbal and visual information. Ability also modulated how rewarding information is. Answers that were more satisfying than expected (information prediction error) were better remembered by controls, but this effect was weaker in dyslexia. In our functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) work with children, only better readers showed ventral striatal activity when successfully learning word meanings from written context. Models of curiosity-driven learning need to incorporate the learner: ability shapes how rewarding it is to fill a knowledge gap.

The locus coeruleus at the intersection of novelty, arousal, and curiosity

Anne Berry¹; ¹Brandeis University

While dopaminergic reward systems have traditionally been implicated in curiosity, curiosity also relies on arousal and uncertainty regulation supported by the locus coeruleus (LC)-norepinephrine system. We paired LC imaging (BOLD fMRI and structural LC contrast ratio) with laboratory and real-world behavioral measures to investigate LC contributions to individual differences in curiosity. In Study 1, we developed the Photographic Art and Storytelling Task to dissociate initial novelty-driven curiosity from subsequent valence-dependent curiosity updating. Participants rated their curiosity about photographs, read stories that were experimentally manipulated to be interesting or boring, and then updated their ratings. Initial novelty-driven curiosity persisted across reappraisals, whereas curiosity for less engaging photographs was more susceptible to change following positive story outcomes. Using connectopic mapping and ultra-high-resolution 7T imaging, we characterized LC functional topography across cortical and subcortical targets. Individuals with less asymmetric and more rostral-like LC connectivity patterns exhibited greater stability of initial novelty-based curiosity. In Study 2, we combined geolocation tracking with ecological momentary assessment across the adult lifespan to examine environmental exploration, indexed by experiential diversity, and its affective consequences in daily life. Older adults exhibited lower experiential diversity, but the within-person affective benefits of experiential diversity were preserved across age. Importantly, individuals with higher LC contrast ratios derived greater affective benefits from experiential diversity, suggesting that the LC-norepinephrine system supports the reinforcing value of novel experiences. Together, these findings identify the LC as a key neural hub linking novelty and affect in ways that may support curiosity across the adult lifespan.