ReviewNature reviews. Neuroscience2024
Curiosity: primate neural circuits for novelty and information seeking.
Review in Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Neural Blueprint of Novelty: A Meta-Analytic Dissection of Active and Passive Novelty Processing Networks.Brain and behavior · 2026Pooled it
- External incentives change the relation between confidence and epistemic curiosity.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Interpretable abstractions of artificial neural networks predict behavior and neural activity during human information gathering.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- AI-Discovered Cognitive Models Reveal Novel Insights into Human and Animal Learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Neural responses to state curiosity in young children.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Motivation, attention, and uncertainty: insights from animal and human research and implications for addiction.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Active disambiguation guides inferring controllability and cause in social interactions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Two Distinct Attentional Priorities Guide Exploratory and Exploitative Gaze in Parallel.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Age-Related Changes in Curiosity: The Influence of Locus Coeruleus on Information-Seeking Behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Addressing Altered Anticipation as a Transdiagnostic Target Through Computational Psychiatry.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Review
- The Orbitofrontal Cortex Underlies Consolidation of Pavlovian Anticipatory Arousal Responses in Macaque Monkeys.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Higher-order and distributed synergistic functional interactions encode information gain in goal-directed learning.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Do goldfish like to be informed?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Dynamic coding and sequential integration of multiple reward attributes by primate amygdala neurons.Nature communications · 2025Article
- To know or not to know? Curiosity and the value of prospective information in animals.Learning & behavior · 2025Review
- Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments.Advances in neural information processing systems · 2025Article
- Playful brains: a possible neurobiological pathway to cognitive health in aging.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- A neural code supporting prospective probabilistic reasoning for instrumental information demand in humans.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Boredom and curiosity: the hunger and the appetite for information.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
For many years, neuroscientists have investigated the behavioural, computational and neurobiological mechanisms that support value-based decisions, revealing how humans and animals make choices to obtain rewards. However, many decisions are influenced by factors other than the value of physical rewards or second-order reinforcers (such as money). For instance, animals (including humans) frequently explore novel objects that have no intrinsic value solely because they are novel and they exhibit the desire to gain information to reduce their uncertainties about the future, even if this information cannot lead to reward or assist them in accomplishing upcoming tasks. In this Review, I discuss how circuits in the primate brain responsible for detecting, predicting and assessing novelty and uncertainty regulate behaviour and give rise to these behavioural components of curiosity. I also briefly discuss how curiosity-related behaviours arise during postnatal development and point out some important reasons for the persistence of curiosity across generations.
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.