Curious monkeys trade 'prize' for information

Monkeys have such robust curiosity that they are willing to give up a surprisingly large portion of a potential prize in order to quickly find out if they selected the winning option at a game of chance, new research has found.

"It is like buying a lottery ticket that you can scratch off and find out if you win immediately, or you can buy one that has a drawing after the evening news," explained co-senior author of the study Benjamin Hayden, professor at University of Rochester in the US.

"Regardless, you would not get the money any more quickly, or in the case of the monkeys, they won't get the squirt of water any sooner. They will just find out if they selected the winning option," Hayden added.

In the study, monkeys were presented with a video gambling task in which they consistently chose to learn in advance if they picked the winning option.

In the video gambling experiments, the researchers found the monkeys not only consistently selected the gamble that informed them if they picked a winner right away, but they were also willing to select that option when the winnings were up to 25 percent less than the gamble that required them to wait for the results.

"One way to think about this is that this is the amount of water the monkeys were willing to pay for the information about if they made the correct choice," first author and lead researcher Tommy Blanchard, a PhD candidate in Hayden's lab, pointed out.

"One of the reasons this research is important," Hayden said, "is because this basic desire for information turns out to be something that's really corrupted in people with anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction, for example."

The study was published in the journal Neuron.