ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Valuation of knowledge and ignorance in mesolimbic reward circuitry.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 92 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
92 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Prevalence and predictors of medical information avoidance: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Trial
- Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Subjective Values in Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Systematic Review.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Why do we seek information about the future? On the origins of subjective value without instrumental value.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Modeling information demand in the framework of probabilistic reasoning.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Feedback-induced attitudinal changes in risk preferences.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Prefrontal cortex development and its implications in mental illness.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- An Integrative Appraisal Model of Epistemic Curiosity.Affective science · 2025Review
- Addressing Altered Anticipation as a Transdiagnostic Target Through Computational Psychiatry.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Review
- Higher-order and distributed synergistic functional interactions encode information gain in goal-directed learning.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Do goldfish like to be informed?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Biased information-seeking and information-integration in social anxiety.Current opinion in psychology · 2025Review
- Counterfactual curiosity in real decisions: The roles of outcome valence and aging.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- To know or not to know? Curiosity and the value of prospective information in animals.Learning & behavior · 2025Review
- Information seeking and the expected utility of information about COVID-19 can be associated with uncertainty and related attitudes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Value of Non-Instrumental Information in Anxiety: Insights from a Resource-Rational Model of Planning.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- From situational interest and state curiosity to personal interest: developmental pathways and underlying mechanisms.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Web-browsing patterns reflect and shape mood and mental health.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
32 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The pursuit of knowledge is a basic feature of human nature. However, in domains ranging from health to finance people sometimes choose to remain ignorant. Here, we show that valence is central to the process by which the human brain evaluates the opportunity to gain information, explaining why knowledge may not always be preferred. We reveal that the mesolimbic reward circuitry selectively treats the opportunity to gain knowledge about future favorable outcomes, but not unfavorable outcomes, as if it has positive utility. This neural coding predicts participants' tendency to choose knowledge about future desirable outcomes more often than undesirable ones, and to choose ignorance about future undesirable outcomes more often than desirable ones. Strikingly, participants are willing to pay both for knowledge and ignorance as a function of the expected valence of knowledge. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), however, responds to the opportunity to receive knowledge over ignorance regardless of the valence of the information. Connectivity between the OFC and mesolimbic circuitry could contribute to a general preference for knowledge that is also modulated by valence. Our findings characterize the importance of valence in information seeking and its underlying neural computation. This mechanism could lead to suboptimal behavior, such as when people reject medical screenings or monitor investments more during bull than bear markets.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.