Speaker
Jacqueline Gottlieb
(Columbia University)
Description
Converging evidence suggests that animals are motivated by curiosity, the intrinsic desire to know, but little is known about the mechanisms of this process. I will discuss historical reasons for why curiosity has been neglected in cognitive science, and the crucial importance of this process for higher cognitive functions and ecological behavior beyond the narrow confines of the laboratory. I will describe a neurocomputational model of curiosity based on meta-level regulation of the fronto-parietal network by an executive circuit – and discuss how the model furthers our mechanistic understanding of curiosity in terms of behavior and neural activity.
