States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit

By Matthias J. Gruber, Bernard D. Gelman, Charan Ranganath. Neuron, 2014

633 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary People find it easier to learn about topics that interest them, but little is known about the mechanisms by which intrinsic motivational states affect learning. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how curiosity (intrinsic motivation to learn) influences memory. In both immediate and one-day delayed memory tests, participants showed improved memory for information that they were curious about, and also for incidental material learned during states of high curiosity. FMRI results revealed that activity in the midbrain and the nucleus accumbens was enhanced during states of high curiosity. Importantly, individual variability in curiosity-driven memory benefits for incidental material was supported by anticipatory activity in the midbrain and hippocampus and by functional connectivity between these regions. These findings suggest a link between the mechanisms supporting extrinsic reward motivation and intrinsic curiosity and highlight the importance of stimulating curiosity in order to create more effective learning experiences.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef3d9ded8cec0a904211df451676991fe085486f

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children (2018, background): “‍ During states of high curiosity, functional MRI results showed enhanced activity in healthy humans in their early 20s the midbrain and nucleus and functional connectivity to hippocampus, which solidifies connections between intrinsic motivation and hippocampus-dependent 79 learning.”
A Case for Domain-Specific Curiosity in Mathematics (2019, background): “A smaller, but growing body of research suggests that curiosity has a similar, positive impact on learning (Gruber et al. 2014; Kang et al. 2009;McGillivray et al. 2015; van Schijndel et al. 2018).”
Science Is Awe-Some: The Emotional Antecedents of Science Learning (2017, background): “…minor violations of expectations, while violations that represent major threats to understanding either evoke fear-like aversive reactions (Hebb, 1949; Loewenstein, 1994) or are simply ignored because of an inability to assimilate the new information into existing mental structures (Chinn…”
The foraging brain (2015, background): “Ultimately, we hope this line of work will be integrated into studies of the neural bases of information-seeking and curiosity — key drivers of search behavior in foraging [48,49 ,50], and to search more generally [7].”
Process Account of Curiosity and Interest: A Reward-Learning Perspective (2018, background): “The critical role of reward processing in curiosity and interest has been a recurrent idea in the literature (Berlyne 1971; Panksepp 1998) and has received increased attention in the recent literature of cognitive neuroscience (Gruber et al. 2014; Kang et al. 2009; Kidd and Hayden 2015; Murayama et ”
Neuromodulated Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity, and Theory of Three-Factor Learning Rules (2016, methodology): “…S that conveys surprise, i.e., ẇ = S · H(pre, post), Phasic signals of neuromodulators that reach a large fraction of neurons in the brain are good candidates for transmitting such a surprise or curiosity signal that gates plasticity (Gu, 2002; Lisman et al., 2011; Gruber et al., 2014).”
Intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and learning: Theory and applications in educational technologies. (2016, background): “The modulation of hippocampus-dependent learning by curiosity states was confirmed in (Gruber et al., 2014).”
Post-learning hippocampal dynamics promote preferential retention of rewarding events (2016, background): “It is possible that the predominance of reward value in the classification analysis was a consequence of the fact that the hippocampal ROI included only reward-selective hippocampal voxels (independently derived in a meta-analysis; cf. Gruber et al., 2014).”