ArticleNature human behaviour2020
Shared striatal activity in decisions to satisfy curiosity and hunger at the risk of electric shocks.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 122 citations in OpenAlex.
- Schizotypy and subclinical depression relate to specific trait curiosity dimensions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Neural responses to state curiosity in young children.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Role of the striatum in counterfactual information seeking.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Frustration brake failure hypothesis of substance use disorders.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- More Time and Effort, Same Curiosity: Expected Effort Does Not Impact Curiosity.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- An Integrative Appraisal Model of Epistemic Curiosity.Affective science · 2025Review
- Timing of reward cues alters the interaction between reward and interest on memory over time.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Curiosity and surprise differentially affect memory depending on age.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- To know or not to know? Curiosity and the value of prospective information in animals.Learning & behavior · 2025Review
- Curiosity across the adult lifespan: Age-related differences in state and trait curiosity.PloS one · 2025Article
- Hierarchical surprise signals in naturalistic violation of expectations.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Curiosity shapes spatial exploration and cognitive map formation in humans.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Characterization of neuronal oscillations in the prelimbic cortex, nucleus accumbens and CA1 hippocampus during object retrieval task in rats predisposed to early life stress.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2024Article
- The magic, memory, and curiosity fMRI dataset of people viewing magic tricks.Scientific data · 2024Article
- The effect of noninstrumental information on reward learning.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Metacognition of curiosity: People underestimate the seductive lure of non-instrumental information.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Curiosity Satisfaction Increases Event-related Potentials Sensitive to Reward.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- The aesthetic valve: how aesthetic appreciation may switch emotional states from anxiety to curiosity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Broad brain networks support curiosity-motivated incidental learning of naturalistic dynamic stimuli with and without monetary incentives.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Curiosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty. However, curiosity may come at a cost that sometimes puts people in harmful situations. Here, using a set of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments with stimuli that strongly trigger curiosity (for example, magic tricks), we examine the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the motivational effect of curiosity. We consistently demonstrate that across different samples, people are indeed willing to gamble, subjecting themselves to electric shocks to satisfy their curiosity for trivial knowledge that carries no apparent instrumental value. Also, this influence of curiosity shares common neural mechanisms with that of hunger for food. In particular, we show that acceptance (compared to rejection) of curiosity-driven or incentive-driven gambles is accompanied by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum when curiosity or hunger was elicited, which extends into the dorsal striatum when participants made a decision.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.