Humans are known to seek non-instrumental information, sometimes expending considerable effort or taking risks to receive it, for example, ‘curiosity killed the cat’. This suggests that information is highly motivationally salient. In the current article, we first review recent empirical studies that demonstrated the strong motivational lure of curiosity – people will pay and risk electric shocks for non-instrumental information; and request information that has negative emotional consequences. Then we suggest that this seductive lure of curiosity may reflect a motivational mechanism that has been discussed in the literature of reward learning: incentive salience. We present behavioral and neuroscientific evidence in support of this idea and propose two areas requiring further investigation – how incentive salience for information is instigated; and individual differences in motivational vigor.

众所周知，人类会寻找非仪器信息，有时会花费大量精力或冒风险来获取信息，例如，“好奇杀死了猫”。这表明信息在动机上非常重要。在当前文章中，我们首先回顾最近的经验研究，这些研究表明了强烈的好奇心诱人动机–人们将为非工具性信息支付电击风险并承担电击风险；并要求提供负面的情绪后果的信息 然后我们认为，这种诱人的好奇心诱惑可能反映了奖励学习文献中已经讨论过的一种激励机制：激励显着性。我们提出了支持这一想法的行为和神经科学证据，并提出了两个需要进一步研究的领域–如何激发对信息的激励显着；和动机活力的个体差异。