Schedule of Events | Symposia

Neural basis of information seeking and learning during naturalistic web browsing

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Haowen Su¹ (su390@purdue.edu), Coralie Knight¹, Yoolim Hong¹, Taylor Korn¹, Hongmi Lee¹; ¹Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

Curiosity-driven, self-guided information seeking plays a crucial role in real-world learning and knowledge acquisition, yet its neural underpinnings remain largely unexplored in naturalistic settings. To address this gap, we conducted an fMRI study using a novel, unconstrained web browsing paradigm in which participants freely explored real-world web content and later verbally recalled their browsing experiences. We focused on the natural moment-to-moment fluctuations of two independent motivations underlying information seeking, the liking and wanting of information (Litman, 2005), which participants retrospectively rated while watching recordings of their own web browsing sessions. We found that the two motivational dimensions were associated with both distinct and overlapping patterns of brain activation during web browsing. Specifically, higher liking was linked to increased activation in the amygdala and visual cortex and decreased activation in the anterior insula. In contrast, higher wanting was associated with greater activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex. Both high liking and high wanting activated parietal and temporal subregions of the default mode network. Additionally, the two motivational dimensions independently influenced memory formation during web browsing. Higher liking predicted successful recall of browsing events, regardless of wanting levels. Conversely, lower wanting predicted better recall, due to the significant mnemonic advantages of unexpectedly enjoyable content. Together, these findings highlight the distinct roles of the motivational dimensions of liking and wanting in shaping neural activity and memory formation during naturalistic information seeking.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic