Macaques preferentially attend to intermediately surprising information

Normative learning theories dictate that we should preferentially attend
to informative sources, but only up to the point that our limited learning
systems can process their content. Humans, including infants, show this
predicted strategic deployment of attention. Here we demonstrate that
rhesus monkeys, much like humans, attend to events of moderate
surprisingness over both more and less surprising events. They do this in
the absence of any specific goal or contingent reward, indicating that the
behavioral pattern is spontaneous. We suggest this U-shaped attentional
preference represents an evolutionarily preserved strategy for guiding
intelligent organisms toward material that is maximally useful for
learning.