ArticlePloS one2021
Curiosity or savouring? Information seeking is modulated by both uncertainty and valence.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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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
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- An Integrative Appraisal Model of Epistemic Curiosity.Affective science · 2025Review
- Counterfactual curiosity in real decisions: The roles of outcome valence and aging.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Three diverse motives for information sharing.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Individual differences in information demand have a low dimensional structure predicted by some curiosity traits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The Role of Stimulus Uncertainty and Curiosity in Attention Control.Experimental psychology · 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
- Anxiety and curiosity in hierarchical models of neural emotion processing-A mini review.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Review
- Broad brain networks support curiosity-motivated incidental learning of naturalistic dynamic stimuli with and without monetary incentives.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- The non-unitary nature of information preference.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Uncertainty drives exploration of negative information across younger and older adults.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- People are curious about immoral and morally ambiguous others.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Counterfactual curiosity: motivated thinking about what might have been.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Removal of reinforcement improves instrumental performance in humans by decreasing a general action bias rather than unmasking learnt associations.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- People adaptively use information to improve their internal states and external outcomes.Cognition · 2022Article
- Curiosity-driven learning in adults with and without dyslexia.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2022Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the subjective value of information.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Uncertainty increases curiosity, but decreases happiness.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Curiosity is pervasive in our everyday lives, but we know little about the factors that contribute to this drive. In the current study, we assessed whether curiosity about uncertain outcomes is modulated by the valence of the information, i.e. whether the information is good or bad news. Using a lottery task in which outcome uncertainty, expected value and outcome valence (gain versus loss) were manipulated independently, we found that curiosity is overall higher for gains compared with losses and that curiosity increased with increasing outcome uncertainty for both gains and losses. These effects of uncertainty and valence did not interact, indicating that the motivation to reduce uncertainty and the motivation to maximize positive information represent separate, independent drives.
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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.