ArticleCognition2019
Monkeys are curious about counterfactual outcomes.
Article in Cognition, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Drivers of exploration early in development: Perceptual novelty rather than a quest for information.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Why do we seek information about the future? On the origins of subjective value without instrumental value.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Role of the striatum in counterfactual information seeking.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- More Time and Effort, Same Curiosity: Expected Effort Does Not Impact Curiosity.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- An Information-Theoretic Framework for Understanding Learning and Choice Under Uncertainty.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Monkeys increase scratching when encountering unexpected good fortune.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- To know or not to know? Curiosity and the value of prospective information in animals.Learning & behavior · 2025Review
- Flexible information-seeking in chimpanzees.Cognition · 2024Article
- The Role of Stimulus Uncertainty and Curiosity in Attention Control.Experimental psychology · 2024Article
- A neural mechanism for conserved value computations integrating information and rewards.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Widespread coding of navigational variables in prefrontal cortex.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Visuospatial information foraging describes search behavior in learning latent environmental features.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Neural responses in macaque prefrontal cortex are linked to strategic exploration.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Hierarchical organization of rhesus macaque behavior.Oxford open neuroscience · 2023Article
- Counterfactual curiosity: motivated thinking about what might have been.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Macaques preferentially attend to intermediately surprising information.Biology letters · 2022Article
- The Promise of Behavioral Tracking Systems for Advancing Primate Animal Welfare.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Many non-human animals show exploratory behaviors. It remains unclear whether any possess human-like curiosity. We previously proposed three criteria for applying the term curiosity to animal behavior: (1) the subject is willing to sacrifice reward to obtain information, (2) the information provides no immediate instrumental or strategic benefit, and (3) the amount the subject is willing to pay depends systematically on the amount of information available. In previous work on information-seeking in animals, information generally predicts upcoming rewards, and animals' decisions may therefore be a byproduct of reinforcement processes. Here we get around this potential confound by taking advantage of macaques' ability to reason counterfactually (that is, about outcomes that could have occurred had the subject chosen differently). Specifically, macaques sacrificed fluid reward to obtain information about counterfactual outcomes. Moreover, their willingness to pay scaled with the information (Shannon entropy) offered by the counterfactual option. These results demonstrate the existence of human-like curiosity in non-human primates according to our criteria, which circumvent several confounds associated with less stringent criteria.
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Registered trials
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.