independent of extrinsic rewards<\/a> like food or mating opportunities and drives animals to explore their environments.<\/p>\nBut exactly how some parts of any animal\u2019s environment sparks more curiosity than others remains unclear.<\/p>\n
Researchers theorise that curiosity tends to be biased toward moderately complex or uncertain stimuli while avoiding overly simple or complex situations.<\/p>\n
This is called the “Goldilocks principle\u201d and also characterises human curiosity.<\/p>\n
However, very few studies have explored this impulse in animals.<\/p>\n
![\"Monkey](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Monkey-playing-video-game.png\")
Monkey playing video game (KyotoU\/Sakumi Iki)<\/p>\n
Scientists from Japan\u2019s Kyoto University assessed how curiosity works in monkeys by exposing them to a touchscreen video game.<\/p>\n
In recent years, video games have emerged as tools to help train cognitive abilities and improve the quality of life for humans.<\/p>\n
Studies have also explored whether video games can spark the engagement of animals in laboratories and zoos, and potentially help improve their welfare.<\/p>\n
“I originally studied play behaviour in wild monkeys, so I have long wanted to create situations in the laboratory where monkeys’ play behaviour could emerge naturally,\u201d explained Sakumi Iki, an author of the study published in the journal iScience.<\/p>\n
Researchers probed exactly what kind of stimuli could elicit the curiosity of resident Japanese macaques.<\/p>\n
They developed a touchscreen-based game task inspired by hide-and-seek.<\/p>\n
In this game, when a monkey presses a button on the touchscreen, a puppet appears at a different location on the screen, depending on the button.<\/p>\n
The puppet appearances correspond to different levels of noise, with puppets appearing in a less predictable location the higher the noise level.<\/p>\n
Scientists observed the monkeys\u2019 responses to medium versus low noise, then medium versus high noise.<\/p>\n
They found that the monkeys chose the medium noise button, which made the puppet appear in a location that was somewhat predictable but still moderately uncertain.<\/p>\n
This suggests that macaques, like humans, have a tendency to actively explore stimuli with a moderate level of uncertainty compared to stimuli that are too simple or too random.<\/p>\n
The monkeys also spent long stretches of time playing the game, supporting the game’s success in sparking their curiosity.<\/p>\n
“In typical cognitive tasks, monkeys are usually given food rewards to keep them motivated, so I was not very confident they would engage with the game without rewards,” Dr Iki says.<\/p>\n
\u201cYet surprisingly, some monkeys worked on this game for nearly 100 trials even without any reward,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In future studies, researchers hope to apply the findings to develop more games that attract the monkeys’ curiosity.<\/p>\n
They hope to identify the neural and cognitive mechanisms behind curiosity to gain a \u201cmore comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":948075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[70,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-948074","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116544083542617983","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=948074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/948075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=948074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=948074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=948074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}