Curiosity refers to a demand for information that has no instrumental benefit. Because of its critical role in development and in the regulation of learning, curiosity has long fascinated psychologists. However, it has been difficult to study curiosity from the perspective of the single neuron or the circuit – that is, at the systems level. Recent advances; however, have made doing so more feasible. These include theoretical advances in defining curiosity in animal models, the development of tasks that manipulate curiosity, and the preliminary identification of circuits responsible for curiosity-motivated learning. Taken together, resulting scholarship demonstrates the key roles of executive control, reward, and learning circuits in driving curiosity and has helped us to understand how curiosity relates to information-seeking more broadly. This work has implications for mechanisms of reward-based decisions. Here we summarize these results and highlight important remaining questions for the future of curiosity studies.

好奇心是指对没有工具性好处的信息的需求。由于好奇心在发展和学习调节中起着至关重要的作用，好奇心长期以来一直吸引着心理学家。但是，很难从单个神经元或回路的角度来研究好奇心，也就是在系统上水平。近期进展; 但是，这样做更加可行。这些包括在动物模型中定义好奇心的理论进展，操纵好奇心的任务的发展，以及初步确定负责好奇心学习的回路。总之，由此产生的奖学金证明了执行控制，奖励和学习回路在激发好奇心方面的关键作用，并帮助我们更深入地了解好奇心与寻求信息的关系。这项工作对基于奖励的决策机制具有影响。在这里，我们总结了这些结果，并着重指出了好奇心研究未来的重要问题。