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Curiosity: primate neural circuits for novelty and information seeking

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 25, pages 195–208 (2024)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 12 February 2024

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Abstract

For many years, neuroscientists have investigated the behavioural, computational and neurobiological mechanisms that support value-based decisions, revealing how humans and animals make choices to obtain rewards. However, many decisions are influenced by factors other than the value of physical rewards or second-order reinforcers (such as money). For instance, animals (including humans) frequently explore novel objects that have no intrinsic value solely because they are novel and they exhibit the desire to gain information to reduce their uncertainties about the future, even if this information cannot lead to reward or assist them in accomplishing upcoming tasks. In this Review, I discuss how circuits in the primate brain responsible for detecting, predicting and assessing novelty and uncertainty regulate behaviour and give rise to these behavioural components of curiosity. I also briefly discuss how curiosity-related behaviours arise during postnatal development and point out some important reasons for the persistence of curiosity across generations.

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Fig. 1: Multiple interacting sources of curiosity-related behaviours.
Fig. 2: Object novelty sensitivity in the primate brain.
Fig. 3: Neural network for novelty seeking in the primate brain.
Fig. 4: Neural network for uncertainty reduction in the primate brain.
Fig. 5: Neural network for integrating the value of information with the value of physical reward in the primate brain.

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Acknowledgements

This Review was written while on sabbatical at INSERM (Lyon, France) and in part supported by the Neurodis Foundation from July through December of 2022. The author thanks CNRS and INSERM, and particularly the team of E. Procyk, for the intellectual stimulation and hospitality during this time. Gratitude is also expressed to the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine that has supported me on the scientific journey that led to this research, particularly A. Bonni for his initial support and advice. This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health under award numbers R01MH128344, R01MH110594 and R01MH116937, by Conte Center on the Neurocircuitry of OCD MH10643 and by the McKnight Foundation. This Review is based on the brilliant and brave work of the past and current members of my laboratory, and in particular, I thank K. Kocher for providing fantastic and caring animal care, J. Kael White for discovering neural representations of uncertainty in the basal ganglia and linking them directly to the anticipation of information gain, E. S. Bromberg-Martin and Y.-Y. Feng for discovering the behavioural and neural algorithms that guide uncertainty reducing information gathering, T. Ogasawara for finding the neural circuit that regulates perceptual novelty seeking, K. Zhang for his efforts to assess the heterogenous nature of novelty detection in the primate brain, and E. S. Bromberg-Martin and F. Sogukpinar for the many interesting discussions of evolutionary models of curiosity. I am grateful to the current members of my laboratory and P. Dayan, C. Hartley, E. Procyk and G. Tavoni for the insightful, detailed and critical comments.

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  1. Department of Neuroscience, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Ilya E. Monosov

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Ilya E. Monosov

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Ilya E. Monosov

  4. Department of Neurosurgery, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Ilya E. Monosov

  5. Pain Center, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Ilya E. Monosov

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Monosov, I.E. Curiosity: primate neural circuits for novelty and information seeking. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 25, 195–208 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00784-9

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