Information seeking behaviour: a comparative analysis

In an uncertain world, decision-makers can improve the chances of achieving their goals by acquiring relevant information. For example, when searching for food, great tits sample the environment before making choices about which patches to exploit. This helps them to maximise their energy intake over time, resulting in fitness gains. When information is useful, like when it increases foraging efficiency, its adaptive value is clear to understand. When, on the other hand, organisms appear seek information that is functionally useless - like when it is received post-choice - the behaviour is no so clear to interpret and is therefore interesting. Surprisingly, in an experimental protocol called paradoxical choice, pigeons, starlings and rats consistently prefer alternatives that provide them with information that they cannot use, even when selecting the informative option comes at a cost. This behaviour seems closely related to curiosity - the observation that individuals appear motivated just to 'know'- and has even been suggested as an analogue of human gambling. In my thesis, I will investigate how and why animals learn to perform actions that result in the acquisition of functionless information, by conducting paradoxical choice experiments to disambiguate between theoretical hypotheses that aim to explain the behaviour. I am particularly interested in testing the idea that a preference for the informative option in the paradoxical choice task is an adaptation to foraging scenarios in the natural environment. To further develop and test this idea, I will conduct behavioural experiments on rats. Furthermore, to investigate the taxonomic ubiquity of a costly preference for information in animals, I will implement paradoxical choice experiments on bees and fish, that hitherto have been unexplored in this context.