Episodic curiosity for avoiding asteroids: Per-trial information gain for choice outcomes drive information seeking
Humans often appear to desire information for its own sake, but it is presently unclear what drives this desire. The important role that resolving uncertainty plays in stimulating information seeking has suggested a tight coupling between the intrinsic motivation to gather information and performance gains, and has been construed as a drive for long-term learning. Using a simple asteroid-avoidance game that allows us to study learning and information seeking at an experimental time-scale, we show that we can separate the incentive for information-seeking from a long-term learning outcome, and show that information-seeking is best predicted by per-trial outcome uncertainty. Specifically, our 43 participants were more willing to take time penalties for feedback on trials with uncertain outcomes. We found strong group (R2 = .97) and individual level (mean R2 = .44) support for a linear relationship between feedback request rate and information gain as determined by per-trial outcome uncertainty. This information better reflects filling in the gaps of the episodic record of choice outcomes than long-term skill acquisition or assessment. Our results suggest that this easy to compute quantity can drive information-seeking, potentially allowing simple organisms to intelligently gather information without having to anticipate the impact on future performance.