What drive information-seeking in healthy and addicted behaviors

Information-seeking is an important aspect of human cognition. Despite its adaptive role, we have rather limited understanding of the mechanisms that underlie information-seeking in healthy individuals and in psychopathological populations. Here, we investigate human information-seeking behaviors in healthy individuals and in behavioral addiction by using a novel decision-making task and a novel reinforcement learning model. We compare how healthy humans and addicted individuals differ in the way they trade off a general desire to reduce uncertainty (general information-seeking) and a desire for novelty (novelty-seeking) when searching for knowledge in the environment. Our results indicate that healthy humans and addicted individuals adopt distinct information-seeking modes. Healthy information-seeking behavior was mostly driven by novelty. Addicted individuals’ information-seeking was instead driven by both novelty and general information, with reduced novelty-seeking and increased general information-seeking compared to healthy controls. There are three important implications for our findings: (1) Enhanced novelty-seeking behaviors might be a predictor of wellbeing, (2) behavioral addiction may be marked by a reduction of novelty-seeking and an increase in general information-seeking, (3) the altered information-seeking pattern in addicted individuals may be a compensatory strategy that help them to cope with decision making under uncertainty. By showing healthy humans and addicted individuals adopt distinct information-seeking modes, this study not only sheds light on alterations in decision-making behavior in addiction, but also highlights the likely functional and biological dissociation of novelty-seeking and general information-seeking in the human brain.

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