Fig. 1: Task schematics & Memory performance.

a Prior to fMRI scanning, participants were shown a series of trivia questions. For each, they were told to indicate the likelihood that they knew the answer, and how curious they were about it. Questions were excluded if participants indicated a likelihood of knowing the answer above 90%. The remaining questions were separated into tertiles to be used for fMRI scanning, with the 1st and 3rd tertile categorized as Low and High Curiosity questions respectively (72 questions each). During fMRI scanning, participants were shown each trivia question along with a colored rectangle that indicated the duration and action contingency of the trial. On action-contingent trials, an arrow was presented after a 9 s or 13 s delay. Participants indicated the direction of the arrow with a button press. This was followed by the presentation of the trivia answer. On non-action contingent trials, the trivia answer was presented immediately after the delay interval. Following the scan, participants were shown each trivia question and were required to recall its associated answer. Analyses of answer Anticipation used activation evoked by each question (the Question Interval). Analyses of answer encoding used activation evoked by each answer (Answer Interval, including the response on action-contingent trials). b Box plots for memory recall performance across each condition. Memory recall was better for high- (orange) than low-curiosity (blue) trials based on two-tailed paired t-test (t(22) = 9.32, p < 0.001, d = 1.94, mean difference = 0.23, 95% CI = [0.18 0.28]; N = 23 participants).The center of each box corresponds to the mean value, the upper and lower hinges correspond to the first and third quartiles, while the whiskers correspond to the largest and smallest values within 1.5 times of the interquartile range. Each dot corresponds to the recall performance of each participant. ***p < 0.001.