Leveraging vision to understand curiosity

Humans are immensely curious and motivated to reduce uncertainty. Inspired by studies of sensory uncertainty, we hypothesized that visual areas provide multivariate representations of uncertainty, which are read out by higher-order areas that encode confidence and, ultimately, translated into curiosity. During fMRI, participants rated their confidence in identifying distorted images of animals and objects and their curiosity to see the clear image. We found that curiosity peaked at low confidence. To link sensory certainty and curiosity, we estimated “OTC Certainty” as the product of absolute and relative evidence for animals vs. object categories in occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) while participants viewed the distorted image. OTC Certainty negatively correlated with curiosity, while univariate activity in two frontal regions – vmPFC and ACC – positively correlated with confidence. The relationship between OTC certainty and curiosity was mediated by the vmPFC but not ACC. The results reveal neural mechanisms that generate curiosity from representations of uncertainty.