ArticleCognition2022
Contributions of expected learning progress and perceptual novelty to curiosity-driven exploration.
Article in Cognition, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- External incentives change the relation between confidence and epistemic curiosity.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- How Uncertainty Affects Children's Exploration and Exploitation in Statistical Learning.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Article
- Development of Uncertainty Sensitivity: Early Competence or Protracted Development?Developmental science · 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
- Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Novelty as a drive of human exploration in complex stochastic environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Building momentum: A computational account of persistence toward long-term goals.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Perceptual Novelty Drives Early Exploration in a Bottom-Up Manner.Developmental science · 2025Article
- The CuriousOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Latent Learning Progress Drives Autonomous Goal Selection in Human Reinforcement Learning.Advances in neural information processing systems · 2024Article
- Autistic traits foster effective curiosity-driven exploration.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Infants evaluate informativeness of evidence and predict causal events as revealed in theta oscillations and predictive looking.Communications 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
- Multifaceted information-seeking motives in children.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Eight-Month-Old Infants Meta-Learn by Downweighting Irrelevant Evidence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Exploration is curiosity-driven when it relies on the intrinsic motivation to know rather than on extrinsic rewards. Recent evidence shows that artificial agents perform better on a variety of tasks when their learning is curiosity-driven, and humans often engage in curiosity-driven learning when sampling information from the environment. However, which mechanisms underlie curiosity is still unclear. Here, we let participants freely explore different unknown environments that contained learnable sequences of events with varying degrees of noise and volatility. A hierarchical reinforcement learning model captured how participants were learning in these different kinds of unknown environments, and it also tracked the errors they expected to make and the learning opportunities they were planning to seek. With this computational approach, we show that participants' exploratory behavior is guided by learning progress and perceptual novelty. Moreover, we demonstrate an overall tendency of participants to avoid extreme forms of uncertainty. These findings elucidate the cognitive mechanisms that underlie curiosity-driven exploration of unknown environments. Implications of this novel way of quantifying curiosity within a reinforcement learning framework are discussed.
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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.