Ilya Monosov, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Neuroscience
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Neurobiology of Curiosity

Over the past few decades, the highly active fields of neuroethology and neuroeconomics have been assessing the behavioral, computational, and neural basis of value-based decisions, studying how we make choices to obtain physical reward. However, not all decisions are guided by the values of extrinsic or physical rewards. For example, humans and many animals often choose to spend time exploring valueless novel objects, for novelty’s own sake. And they commonly display a curiosity to obtain information to reduce their uncertainty about the future, even when this information cannot be used in the service of reward seeking. But, despite the prevalence and the importance of novelty and information seeking behaviors in our daily life, their neurobiological and algorithmic basis have remained poorly understood. In my talk, I will discuss our recent multi-disciplinary cross-species experiments that provide important breakthroughs in the understanding of the neurobiology and computational basis of novelty and information seeking, and I will highlight how this data is beginning to shed light on the mechanisms of mental disorders in which information seeking is commonly disrupted.  

Faculty Host: Veit Stuphorn