Summary: A new study reveals how the brain triggers curiosity in response to visual ambiguity. Researchers identified brain areas that assess uncertainty, thereby eliciting curiosity. Using fMRI, they found that low confidence in image recognition leads to greater curiosity. This finding highlights the deep biological roots of human curiosity and its role in creativity.
Highlights:
- Curiosity Trigger: Areas of the brain assess uncertainty to arouse curiosity.
- Information about fMRI: Low confidence in image recognition increases curiosity.
- Biological origins: Curiosity drives exploration and creativity beyond survival needs.
Source: Columbia University
You look up at the clear blue sky and see something you can’t quite place. Is it a balloon? A plane? A UFO? You’re curious, aren’t you?
A research team based at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute has been able to observe for the first time what happens in the human brain when feelings of curiosity like this arise.
In a study published in the Journal of NeuroscienceScientists have revealed areas of the brain that appear to assess the degree of uncertainty in visually ambiguous situations, giving rise to subjective feelings of curiosity.
“Curiosity has deep biological origins,” said corresponding author Jacqueline Gottlieb, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Zuckerman Institute. The primary evolutionary advantage of curiosity, she added, is that it encourages living things to explore their world in ways that help them survive.
“What distinguishes human curiosity is that it drives us to explore much more broadly than other animals, and often simply because we want to discover things, not because we are seeking material reward or survival advantage,” said Dr. Gottlieb, who is also a professor of neuroscience at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
“This gives us a lot of creativity.”
Dr. Gottlieb was joined in this research by Michael Cohanpour, PhD, a former Columbia graduate student (now a data scientist at dsm-firmenich), and Mariam Aly, PhD, also formerly at Columbia and now an interim associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
In the study, the researchers used a widely used, noninvasive technology to measure changes in blood oxygen levels in the brains of 32 volunteers. Called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the technology allowed scientists to record how much oxygen different parts of the subjects’ brains were consuming while they looked at images. The more oxygen a brain region is consuming, the more active it is.
To uncover the brain areas involved in curiosity, the research team presented participants with special images called texforms. These are images of objects, such as a walrus, a frog, a tank, or a hat, that have been distorted to varying degrees to make them more or less difficult to recognize.
The researchers asked participants to rate their confidence and curiosity about each text form and found that the two ratings were inversely related. The more confident subjects were that they knew what the text form represented, the less curious they were about it. Conversely, the less confident subjects were that they could guess what the text form was, the more curious they were about it.
Using fMRI, the researchers then observed what was happening in the subjects’ brains while they were presented with the texforms. The brain imaging data showed elevated activity in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), a region just above the ears that has long been known to be involved in vision and recognizing object categories.
Based on previous studies, the researchers expected that when they presented participants with bright images, this brain region would show distinct activity patterns for animate and inanimate objects.
“You can think of each pattern as a ‘barcode’ identifying the category of texform,” Dr. Gottlied said.
The researchers used these patterns to develop a measure, which they called “OTC uncertainty,” of how uncertain this cortical area was about the category of a distorted text form. They showed that when subjects were less curious about a text form, their OTC activity corresponded to only one barcode, as if it clearly identified whether the image belonged in the animate or inanimate category.
In contrast, when subjects were more curious, their OTC exhibited characteristics of both barcodes, as if it could not clearly identify the image category.
Two regions in the front of the brain were also active during the texform presentations. One is the anterior cingulate cortex, which previous studies have implicated in information gathering. The other is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is involved in tracking a person’s subjective perceptions of value and trustworthiness in different situations. In the new study, both areas were more active when subjects reported being more certain about a texform’s identity (and thus less curious about seeing the image clarified).
Importantly, Dr. Gottlieb said, vmPFC activity appears to provide a neurological bridge between the subjective feeling of curiosity and the OTC measure of certainty. It’s as if this region is reading the uncertainty encoded by the distributed pattern of activity in the OTC and helping a person decide whether to be curious about the textual form.
“This is really the first time we can link the subjective feeling of curiosity about information to how your brain represents that information,” Dr. Gottlieb said.
The study has two important implications, Dr. Gottlieb said. First, although the study focused on perceptual curiosity elicited by visual stimuli, people experience other forms of curiosity, such as curiosity about general knowledge questions and facts (for example, how tall is the Eiffel Tower?) or social curiosity (what restaurant did my friends go to last night?).
One interesting possibility of this study, she noted, is that the mechanism discovered could extend to other forms of curiosity. For example, an fMRI study examining more or less recognizable sounds could show that auditory areas of the brain convey uncertainty about the sound and that the vmPFC reads this uncertainty to determine curiosity.
A second possibility Dr. Gottlieb considers is that the findings could have diagnostic and even therapeutic implications for people suffering from depression, apathy or anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure), which are conditions often marked by a lack of curiosity.
“Curiosity involves a kind of enthusiasm, a willingness to expend energy and study what’s around us. And it’s intrinsically motivated, meaning no one pays you to be curious; you’re curious simply because you hope something good will happen when you learn,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “These are just some of the amazing things about curiosity.”
About this neurodevelopmental research news
Author: Ivan Amato
Source: Columbia University
Contact: Ivan Amato – Columbia University
Picture: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Access closed.
“Neural representations of sensory uncertainty and confidence are associated with perceptual curiosity” by Jacqueline Gottlieb et al. Journal of Neuroscience
Abstract
Neural representations of sensory uncertainty and confidence are associated with perceptual curiosity
Humans are extremely curious and motivated to reduce uncertainty, but little is known about the neural mechanisms that generate curiosity.
Curiosity is inversely associated with trust, suggesting that it is triggered by states of low trust (subjective uncertainty). The neural mechanisms of this process, however, have been little studied.
What are the mechanisms by which uncertainty about an event gives rise to curiosity about that event?
Inspired by studies of sensory uncertainty, we hypothesized that visual areas provide multivariate representations of uncertainty, which are then read by higher-order structures to generate confidence signals and ultimately trigger curiosity.
During the fMRI, participants (17 women, 15 men) performed a novel task in which they rated their confidence in identifying distorted images of animals and objects and their curiosity about seeing the clear image.
To link sensory certainty to curiosity, we measured the activity evoked by each image in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) and designed a new measure of “OTC Certainty” indicating the strength of evidence that this activity conveys about the categories of animals and objects. We show that, consistent with results obtained using general knowledge questions, perceptual curiosity peaked at low confidence.
Furthermore, OTC certainty was negatively correlated with curiosity, establishing a link between curiosity and a multivariate representation of sensory uncertainty. Finally, univariate (mean) activity in two frontal areas – vmPFC and ACC – was positively correlated with confidence and negatively with curiosity, and vmPFC mediated the relationship between OTC certainty and curiosity.
The results suggest that multiple mechanisms link curiosity to representations of trust and uncertainty.