Centre for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences, ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London, London, UK.
Transl Psychiatry. 2021 Jul 26;11(1):408. doi: 10.1038/s41398-021-01523-3.
As massive amounts of information are becoming available to people, understanding the mechanisms underlying information-seeking is more pertinent today than ever. In this study, we investigate the underlying motivations to seek out information in healthy and addicted individuals. We developed a novel decision-making task and a novel computational model which allows dissociating the relative contribution of two motivating factors to seek out information: a desire for novelty and a general desire for knowledge. To investigate whether/how the motivations to seek out information vary between healthy and addicted individuals, in addition to healthy controls we included a sample of individuals with gambling disorder-a form of addiction without the confound of substance consumption and characterized by compulsive gambling. Our results indicate that healthy subjects and problem gamblers adopt distinct information-seeking "modes". Healthy information-seeking behavior was mostly motivated by a desire for novelty. Problem gamblers, on the contrary, displayed reduced novelty-seeking and an increased desire for accumulating knowledge compared to healthy controls. Our findings not only shed new light on the motivations driving healthy and addicted individuals to seek out information, but they also have important implications for the treatment and diagnosis of behavioral addiction.
随着大量信息可供人们获取，了解信息寻求的背后机制比以往任何时候都更加重要。在这项研究中，我们调查了健康个体和成瘾个体寻求信息的潜在动机。我们开发了一种新的决策任务和一种新的计算模型，该模型允许将寻求信息的两个动机因素的相对贡献分开：对新奇的渴望和对知识的一般渴望。为了研究健康个体和成瘾个体之间的信息寻求动机是否存在差异以及如何存在差异，除了健康对照组，我们还纳入了赌博障碍个体的样本，这是一种没有物质消费混杂的成瘾形式，其特征是强迫性赌博。我们的结果表明，健康个体和问题赌徒采用了不同的信息寻求“模式”。健康的信息寻求行为主要是由对新奇的渴望驱动的。相比之下，问题赌徒与健康对照组相比，对新奇的寻求减少，对知识的渴望增加。我们的发现不仅为驱动健康个体和成瘾个体寻求信息的动机提供了新的见解，而且对行为成瘾的治疗和诊断也具有重要意义。
