Curiosity and Pleasure Curiosity and Pleasure

Heuristic decision making received wide attention due to the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1981) and inspired multiple studies of irrationality of the human mind and a fundamental disregard for knowledge. But what is the source of all human knowledge, including heuristics? We discuss the hypothesis that acquisition of knowledge is a deeply rooted psychological need, a motivational mechanism for perception as well as higher cognition. We report experimental results showing that acquisition of knowledge is emotionally pleasing. The satisfaction of curiosity through acquiring knowledge brings pleasure. This confirms the hypothesis that curiosity or need for knowledge is a fundamental and ancient motivation on a par with other basic needs, such as sex or food. This paper connects curiosity, knowledge, cognition, emotions, including aesthetic emotions of the beautiful, mechanisms of drives, high cognitive functions, minimization of cognitive effort through heuristics, and knowledge maximization. We anticipate our finding to be an important aspect for several classical fields including cognitive dissonance, personality, self, learning, and new directions in cognitive science studying emotions related to acquiring knowledge, personality types in relation to types of knowledge, relating higher cognitive abilities to knowledge-related emotions, and new directions in aesthetics revealing the cognitive nature of the beautiful and music. Introduction Drives, emotions, and knowledge Biologists and psychologists have suggested, at least since the 1950s (Harlow, Harlow, & Meyer, 1950; Berlyne, 1960; Festinger, 1957; Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999), that humans and higher animals possess an innate drive for learning. Its primary or secondary role in an organism was not clear. Analyzing mathematical models of learning, Perlovsky (2006) noted that all such models use some mathematical mechanism of this drive. Perception, cognition, and an ability to satisfy any instinctual need would not be possible without a primary innate drive for learning. In all mathematical models this drive directs the organ ism to inc rease a measure o f the correspondence between sensor signals and mental representat ions of the surrounding world. Correspondingly, he called this measure of the correspondence knowledge (Rehder & Hastie, 2001), and suggested that the drive to increase knowledge, the Knowledge Instinct, KI, (Perlovsky, 2001, 2006) or the Need for Knowledge, KI, (Kagan, 1972) is innate and primary. First we discuss KI, curiosity, and other related mechanisms without differentiating them; later we address fundamental differences. The idea of KI may seem controversial and contradicting the body of work initiated by Tversky and Kahneman (1981). This aspect of the paper will be discussed in details later. The KI, related areas of curiosity, including need for cognition (Cohen, 1957; Cohen, Stotland, & Wolfe, 1955; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao 1984) are areas of extensive research with thousands of publications. However its motivational status, its relations to primary or secondary drives remain confused and unclear in recent research. “Cacioppo and Petty's. need for cognition. (its) motivational aspect that cannot be. conceptualized as needs, drives, or instincts. ” (Cacioppo et al 1996). Loewenstein (1994) emphasized that “Theorizing about curiosity has been largely moribund. the general loss of interest in motivational phenomena such as curiosity. Virtually all. research has examined the cognitive strategies the people use for problem solving. Almost no research on why people are so powerfully driven to solve such problems. even so many researchers. have been struck by the intensity of individual’s efforts. in the absence of material rewards. Curiosity involves an indissoluble mixture of cognition and motivation. drive or not a drive is probably unanswerable. ” In subsequent publications Lowenstein and colleagues concentrated on visceral aspects of curiosity (e.g. Lee, Loewenstein, Ariely, Hong, & Young, 2008). Litman (2005) developed a theory of curiosity related to interest-deprivation and motivational wanting-liking model. Schmidhuber (2009) suggested a theory of curiosity driven by a desire to find a maximally compressed representation of reality. After describing our work, we relate it in more details to the above discussion, and to various existing theories and experimental results. Here we suggest a motivational theory of curiosity, WebmedCentral > Research articles Page 2 of 12 WMC001275 Downloaded from http://www.webmedcentral. com on 30-Dec-2011, 06:16:23 AM addressing the fundamental need for knowledge. We briefly summarize discussions that curiosity is fundamentally important for cognition as a whole. We conceptually review mathematical models of the mind-brain, and discuss that increasing knowledge is a part of all artificial intelligence algorithms and mathematical models of cognition. We argue these models describe a psychological drive that is primary and autonomous at lower levels of cognition (such as perception), and that it acquires aspects of conscious curiosity at higher levels of the mind. We build on a theory of drives and emotions suggested by Grossberg and Levine (1987). According to this theory, satisfaction or dissatisfaction of a drive is perceived emot ional ly (consciously or subconsciously). At lower levels of everyday perceptions these emotions usually are below the threshold of consciousness; KI funct ions autonomously, similar to other bodily needs. For example, stomach functioning could be below a threshold of consciousness as long as it performs its functions as expected, but it immediately rises to a conscious level, if it fails to performs its normal functioning. Similarly, we are not emotionally excited when correctly perceiving an everyday object, such as a chair. However, if normal functioning of perception fails, if KI is dissatisfied at this usually autonomous functioning level, we could feel such a condition highly emotionally, we are terrified. This is a staple of thrillers. Therefore, specific emotions related to KI we identify as aesthetic emotions (Perlovsky, 2010a). They are subjectively perceived as harmony or disharmony between mental representations and surrounding world. These emotions are related to curiosity and to aesthetic emotions (Kant, 1790). Kantian arguments have been reformulated in the contemporary language of psychology and knowledge-related emotions of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of KI have been connected to aesthetic emotions of the beautiful (Perlovsky, 2010a). The Grossberg-Levine theory of drives and emotions (1987) implies that the KI drive includes mechanisms of sensor-like organs and neural circuitry, which measures the knowledge, the correspondence between mental representations and reality, and thus indicate to an organism satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the KI. The candidate brain circuitry has been discussed in (Levine & Perlovsky 2008; Levine 2009). A satisfaction or dissatisfaction of KI is perceived emotionally. Emotional pleasure is deeply rooted into physiology (Cabanac, 1971; Cabanac, Duclaux, & Spector, 1971; Cabanac & Duclaux, 1970) and has been proposed as the fundamental mechanism of decision-making (Cabanac, 1992; Cabanac & Bonniot-Cabanac, 2007; Perlovsky, 2009). Mathematical models of KI have predicted that a fundamental mechanism of perception and cognition includes an evolution of mental representations from vague to crisp (Perlovsky, 2001, 2006). This has been confirmed in brain imaging experiments (Bar et al, 2006; Perlovsky, 2009). The trade-off between maximizing knowledge and an opposite drive to minimize effort, including minimizing cognitive effort through heuristic thinking is discussed in (Levine & Perlovsky, 2008; Levine 2009). Both drives are hypothesized to be evolutionary adaptations. Candidate brain pathways involved in KI were analyzed in (Levine 2009). Despite the significance of the topic, referenced evidence and theoretical d i s c u s s i o n s , e x p e r i m e n t a l s t u d i e s o f knowledge-related emotions have been limited, limited evidence exists for a motivational status of curiosity as related to pure knowledge, without visceral effects and without bodily instincts. Here we address the curiosity for learning new knowledge, and ask, can the pleasure of this effort be demonstrated experimentally? This issue has not been previously studied and it has a principled significance for the KI hypothesis: is KI a primary drive caused and rewarded with pleasure? The present study explores the hypothesis that indeed satisfaction of curiosity and acquisition of knowledge is experienced emotionally as pleasure. Remaining difficulties are discussed near the end of the paper.