CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN
COGNITION & NEUROSCIENCES/ConnexConnex

What drives our curiosity remains an elusive and hotly debated issue. Although uncertainty, prediction error, learning progress, and other candidates have all been proposed as factors which might be fuelling curiosity, an integrative account is still lacking. I advance a model-based framework that traces the moment-by-moment dynamics of these putative drivers and links them quantitatively to behaviour. A series of learning and exploration tasks will pit these drivers against one another, revealing how the importance of different drivers shifts across development and among individuals. I will conclude that embracing this variability is critical for a more complete understanding of curiosity.