ArticleCommunications biology2021
Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the subjective value of information.
Article in Communications biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Physical and cognitive contributions to fatigue perception: The interplay between local muscle fatigue and sensory prediction error.iScience · 2026Article
- Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Accumulation of virtual tokens towards a jackpot reward enhances performance and value encoding in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Modeling information demand in the framework of probabilistic reasoning.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Counterfactual curiosity in real decisions: The roles of outcome valence and aging.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- The Value of Non-Instrumental Information in Anxiety: Insights from a Resource-Rational Model of Planning.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Neural Representations of Sensory Uncertainty and Confidence Are Associated with Perceptual Curiosity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- More widespread and rigid neuronal representation of reward expectation underlies impulsive choices.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Non-instrumental information seeking is resistant to acute stress.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The availability of non-instrumental information increases risky decision-making.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- When knowledge hurts: humans are willing to receive pain for obtaining non-instrumental information.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Hedonism as a motive for information search: biased information-seeking leads to biased beliefs.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Prosocial learning: Model-based or model-free?PloS one · 2023Article
- Preferences for seeking effort or reward information bias the willingness to work.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans have a striking desire to actively seek new information, even when it is devoid of any instrumental utility. However, the mechanisms that drive individuals' subjective preference for information remain unclear. Here, we used fMRI to examine the processing of subjective information value, by having participants decide how much effort they were willing to trade-off for non-instrumental information. We showed that choices were best described by a model that accounted for: (1) the variability in individuals' estimates of uncertainty, (2) their desire to reduce that uncertainty, and (3) their subjective preference for positively valenced information. Model-based analyses revealed the anterior cingulate as a key node that encodes the subjective value of information across multiple stages of decision-making - including when information was prospectively valued, and when the outcome was definitively delivered. These findings emphasise the multidimensionality of information value, and reveal the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the variability in individuals' desire to physically pursue informative outcomes.
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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.