Affective Brain Lab, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom; The Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Affective Brain Lab, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom; The Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Humans are motivated to seek information from their environment. How the brain motivates this behavior is unknown. One speculation is that the brain employs neuromodulatory systems implicated in primary reward-seeking, in particular dopamine, to instruct information-seeking. However, there has been no causal test for the role of dopamine in information-seeking. Here, we show that administration of a drug that enhances dopamine function (dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine; L-DOPA) reduces the impact of valence on information-seeking. Specifically, while participants under Placebo sought more information about potential gains than losses, under L-DOPA this difference was not observed. The results provide new insight into the neurobiology of information-seeking and generates the prediction that abnormal dopaminergic function (such as in Parkinson’s disease) will result in valence-dependent changes to information-seeking.
