In our connected era, we spend significant time and effort satisfying our curiosity. Often, we choose which information we seek, but sometimes the selection is made for us. We hypothesized that humans exhibit enhanced curiosity in the context of choice. We designed a task in which healthy participants saw two lotteries on each trial. On some trials, participants chose which lottery to play. On other trials, the lottery was selected for them. Participants then indicated their curiosity about the outcome of the to-be-played lottery via self-report ratings (Experiment 1, N = 34) or willingness-to-wait decisions (Experiment 2, N = 34). We found that participants exhibited higher curiosity ratings and greater willingness to wait for the outcome of lotteries they had chosen than for lotteries that had been selected for them (controlling for initial preference). This demonstrates that choice boosts curiosity, which may have implications for boosting learning, memory, and motivation.

It is often assumed that the promise of a monetary bonus improves cognitive control. We show that in fact appetitive motivation can also impair cognitive control, depending on baseline levels of dopamine-synthesis capacity in the striatum. These data not only demonstrate that appetitive motivation can have paradoxical detrimental effects for cognitive control but also provide a mechanistic account of these effects.