Learning from and about scientists: Consensus messaging shapes perceptions of climate change and climate scientists.

Despite overwhelming scientific consensus on the existence of human-caused climate change, public opinion among Americans remains split. Directly informing people of scientific consensus is among the most prominent strategies for climate communication, yet the reasons for its effectiveness and its limitations are not fully understood. Here, we propose that consensus messaging provides information not only about the existence of climate change but also traits of climate scientists themselves.

Having multiple selves helps learning agents explore and adapt in complex changing worlds.

Satisfying a variety of conflicting needs in a changing environment is a fundamental challenge for any adaptive agent. Here, we show that designing an agent in a modular fashion as a collection of subagents, each dedicated to a separate need, powerfully enhanced the agent's capacity to satisfy its overall needs. We used the formalism of deep reinforcement learning to investigate a biologically relevant multiobjective task: continually maintaining homeostasis of a set of physiologic variables.

The pursuit of happiness: A reinforcement learning perspective on habituation and comparisons.

In evaluating our choices, we often suffer from two tragic relativities. First, when our lives change for the better, we rapidly habituate to the higher standard of living. Second, we cannot escape comparing ourselves to various relative standards.

If it's important, then I'm curious: Increasing perceived usefulness stimulates curiosity.

Curiosity is considered essential for learning and sustained engagement, yet stimulating curiosity in educational contexts remains a challenge. Can people's curiosity about a scientific topic be stimulated by providing evidence that knowledge about the topic has potential value to society? Here, we show that increasing perceptions of 'social usefulness' regarding a scientific topic also increases curiosity and subsequent information search. Our results also show that simply presenting interesting facts is not enough to influence curiosity, and that people are more likely to be curious about a scientific topic if they perceive it to be useful personally and socially.

Curiosity Is Contagious: A Social Influence Intervention to Induce Curiosity.

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on-line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up-votes as a social cue to popularity.

Reconciling novelty and complexity through a rational analysis of curiosity.

Curiosity is considered to be the essence of science and an integral component of cognition. What prompts curiosity in a learner? Previous theoretical accounts of curiosity remain divided-novelty-based theories propose that new and highly uncertain stimuli pique curiosity, whereas complexity-based theories propose that stimuli with an intermediate degree of uncertainty stimulate curiosity. In this article, we present a rational analysis of curiosity by considering the computational problem underlying curiosity, which allows us to model these distinct accounts of curiosity in a common framework.