The Influence of Mesolimbic-hippocampal Interactions on Episodic Memory During Active Information Seeking

Study 1 will use a novel Game Show task, in which the investigators manipulate participant's agency to control their learning environment to specify unguided exploration. In the encoding session, participants play the producer for a game show. On each trial, participants are shown a trial-unique contestant (2s), and then they select one of 3 presented doors to reveal a hidden object (4 seconds). The selected door is then highlighted (2-4s), which is then removed to show a trial-unique object image, which is framed as a prize (2s). On exploration trials, participants actively select which door to open. On control trials, the participant is forced to select a highlighted door, fostering passive rather than active information seeking. Unbeknownst to participants, there is no relationship between selected doors and revealed objects, as objects are pre-selected for each trial. Thus, timing, motor demands, and visual information are fixed across conditions. Participants will complete 3 runs of both the exploration and control condition, with each run containing 20 trials. Temporal jitters are placed between cues and outcomes and between trials, as determined by design optimization software77. Run will be pseudo-randomized across participants so no more than 2 runs of the same condition will appear in a row. Following encoding, participants will complete immediate and delayed item-associative memory test. On each trial of the memory test, participants will view the characters presented during exploration and control trials as well as new foil characters. If a participant indicates that they have previously seen a character before, the participants will be shown three object images encountered during encoding, and decide which item served as a prize for that specific character. In this way, the investigators can resolve memory for contestants (i.e., cues), and associative binding across contestants and prizes (i.e., cue-outcome). Participants memory will be tested for half the stimuli immediately and at a 24-hour delay.