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, construed as a drive for long-term learning. Using an asteroid-avoidance game that allows us to study learning and information seeking at an experimental time-scale, we show that the incentive for information-seeking can be separated from a long-term learning outcome, with information-seeking best predicted by per-trial outcome uncertainty.